The “Good Men” in Mouthwashing

Spoilers of the full game included

TW: Discussion of Rape, Suicide

A great horror premise exists in the opening minutes of Mouthwashing, an intergalactic scope Amazon sending people billions of miles away, the ship and its crew getting knocked off course and having to deal with a cosmic or lovecraftian horror is a brilliant premise. The PT style haunted hallways in the first few minutes do a good job with setting this up. Posters of the mascot slowly consume the walls, the ship slowly falls apart, ending with a light jumpscare involving a twisted version of the company mascot, a voiced stand of a cartoon horse that haunts the main room of the ship for the rest of the game in a less deformed manner.

Mouthwashing would have been a good critique of mega corporations, it could have been a great Alien style monster horror. It would have been a phenomenal game using a creature similar to ‘The Thing’ to tell a story about how paranoia and desperation erodes trust in even the closest friends. Instead it’s a once in a lifetime experience breaking down the personality and mindset of abusers, and the ways in which bystanders fail to protect or support victims when it’s most needed. Where most developers would widen the scope of the story, Wrong Organ tightens their scope into a laser point to tell a much more personal story, and it’s the greatest decision they could have made.

Two perspectives dominate the main story of Mouthwashing, the co-pilot of the ship Jimmy, and the captain Curly. These protagonists are supported by junior nurse Anya, gruff handyman Swansea and intern Daisuke to make a small intimate cast of 5 characters. Pre-crash sequences are played as Curly, as he interacts with the crew and deals with a series of revelations and bad news. Post-crash is played as Jimmy, the co-pilot who assumes the role of captain once Curly is injured in the crash. These Injuries are gruesome, burning most of his skin, blinding him in one eye and removing most of his limbs. Alternating between past and future you slowly piece together the out of order story, figuring out who caused the crash, the motives of that person and how the crew falls apart as they realise no one will save them. The order the story is told to you very masterfully places the jigsaw pieces together in the right order as you need them, a revelation happens right as you need it, and some stuff can even be inferred just by the tone or wording of a conversation before the big reveal if your eagle eyed enough.

Most of the mysteries the game hides in this structure aren’t actually what the game wants you to think about or explore after the credits roll. Neither the crash, Curly’s Injuries or if they escape/are saved are things the game wants to leave you thinking about. What Wrong Organ wants you to take away from the game and digest is the protagonist Jimmy and his mindset. Jimmy is slowly revealed to be one of the worst moral characters playable in a video game. There are three key actions Jimmy takes that cements him as one of the worst characters in any media. He is responsible for the ship’s crash, he lies to the rest of the crew and blames Curly for said crash, and he is a rapist.

In most of the flashbacks Curly is struggling with two things, disagreements between crew members and his future career. Curly has reached the top of his current Career ladder, and while he is comfortable, he doesn’t feel fulfilled. He explains this to his co-pilot Jimmy, who is initially understanding when Curly is venting to them in the pilot cabin while they drive the ship.. However, when the company sends them a message confirming that once they return from this mission they are all fired and will have to find new work, Jimmy has a change of tune. Curly holds off from telling everyone initially, but eventually manages to muster the courage to let everyone know during his birthday party. Jimmy twists Curly’s words to turn the crew against him, suggesting Curly thinks they are beneath him in some way, that he deserves better. Jimmy knows this wasn’t Curly’s intention, but is jealous of the respect everyone has for Curly, a guy most of the crew consider responsible, dependable and competent and takes this opportunity to try and knock Curly down a peg in his eyes..

Before the crash, Jimmy is responsible for the rape of the only women in the crew, Anya. She tells Curly an undetermined amount of time after it happens, I personally infer that it’s at least a couple weeks after, and he promised to handle it. Once Curly starts to confront him, Jimmy knows he is screwed, its his last job and the moment he steps foot on a planet he will be arrested for the sexual assault. Right before Curly and Jimmy can get deep into the discussion, Jimmy takes a break and uses the opportunity to drive the ship into an asteroid, guaranteeing they will never get back home.

Curly is injured while checking what Jimmy did to the ship, causing the previously described grievous wounds. Seeing him post-crash is devastating, a man in constant searing pain, kept alive with water and penicillin. The few times you have to feed him the drugs the screen goes black and only the sound of his pained chewing plays, Curly screaming while trying to force down pills but letting your imagination create an image much worse than they could ever model. Jimmy blames the captain for the crash to the other crew members, and they agree to try to keep him alive in the hopes he can tell them why he “did it” when he’s better. This never happens of course, and Jimmy never comes clean to the crew.

Treatment of Anya is the main sin the game really wants the player to chew on. It’s slowly hinted at throughout the game but the slow reveal adds to the creeping realisation that you’re playing a monster. Anya’s dialogue is polite, kind and energetic with Curly, more timid and people pleasing and short with Jimmy. In a night time flashback Anya asks Curly why they don’t lock the dormitories at night despite locking many other doors, and Curly responds “for the safety of the crew” which Anya then ponders for a second. To her this statement feels incredibly ironic given her safety has been violated because of these policies. The more details you notice, Jimmy becomes more awful. For example, in dream sequences where everyone’s corporate IDs float in the sky, Anya’s ID has her name and face blurred, she doesn’t even register as a person to Jimmy, just an object he committed a crime on. After her suicide, Jimmy doesn’t see the scene, he sees a bunch of static and blurred out imagery, he refuses to acknowledge how or why she died.

Even the games structure ignores Anya in a way, your perspective for the game is through Curly and Jimmy, so you only see her when they see her, you don’t get the opportunity to learn anything else about the main victim of the antagonist because the 2 characters you play as don’t care enough to learn about Anya beyond a surface level. Curly is more open to learning about her than Jimmy is, which you can tell through the tone of their dialogue, but even Curly doesn’t spend a huge amount of time with her. This is not a criticism of the game for ignoring Anya, but the game uses its perspective and structure to further its point about how victims are ignored and isolated.

A big part of Jimmy’s Arc is slowly coming to the realisation of how ‘guilty’ he feels for Curly, but this doesn’t actually result in any major character change, his obsession with responsibility throughout the game totally ignores the crime that started this downward spiral. Once Anya reveals she is pregnant because of the assault, Jimmy starts worrying about the baby in his dream/nightmare sequences. Not because it’s a human he created, but because it is objective proof of his evil. Proof makes the action harder to run/hide from.

The game ends with Jimmy sacrificing himself for Curly, but doing so in the most meaningless way possible, way beyond the point it would redeem him or help anyone, by placing him in the one existing cryopod, keeping him frozen for up to 20 years. Jimmy then kills himself, the only other character who dies this way is Anya, mimicking the way his victim dies in the hope he is also seen as a victim. The odds of someone finding Curly before he thaws out and then dies of dehydration are next to none, this is a self righteous act designed to make Jimmy feel better about himself before he goes out.

Not only is slowly finding out your experiencing the game through the eyes of its main antagonist an incredible but painful and/or infuriating experience, the game does a commendable job handling topics as heavy as sexual assault, suicide and abortion. Far more sensitively handled than most media. It’s rare for a game’s story, especially a game this short, to incite a hatred of a specific character in me so strongly.

Anya is the victim and Jimmy is the monster in this game, but Anya is realistically failed by almost every other crew member on the ship, all of whom are male. While i do think the game mainly wants you to reflect on Jimmy, who uses many of the psychological methods abusers will use to keep victims around while trying to make themselves out as the victim, i think intentionally or not the game also shows how its easy for friends or colleagues to ignore these signs and directly or indirectly cause further damage.

Daisuke is a teenage intern on the ship who was added last minute, the ship isn’t really suited for more than 5 people but they made it work to fit him in. Daisuke does not actively fail Anya, but he’s an inexperienced youth with no authority and even less of a clue of what’s going on at any given time. Daisuke simply isn’t old or experienced enough to know or understand what happens to Anya. He’s by far the least negative she has given he isn’t actively harming the situation, but he can’t do a whole lot to improve her mood or give her support.

Curly does not handle Anya’s assault with the severity he should as a ship captain. Jettisoning Jimmy out the airlock should be a legitimate idea considered by Curly the moment he’s told what happens. But Curly is pretty good friends with Jimmy, and it’s implied that Jimmy didn’t necessarily have a clean slate before this job, so this is his genuine attempt at a second chance at a normal life. Curly is soft in the way many middle management types would be if a productive worker was accused of something heinous. This is the last job and you’re stuck on the ship together for a few more years, so firing or killing someone is far too messy for Curly, who is essentially one last job away from a nice promotion. We don’t actually get a full idea of how he plans to handle Jimmy, but you can tell the conversation isn’t going to be severe. Curly doesn’t even do much to defend himself at the dinner where Jimmy uses his words against him, reprimanding Jimmy just simply isn’t worth the effort to Curly. Curly is a massive enabler for Jimmy pre-crash and while Anya doesn’t have a lot of time to be disappointed in him before he’s disfigured beyond repair, she should have been. Curly is considered a pretty decent captain and person, most of the crew like him, he’s a pretty normal person with a calm head and a friendly demeanor, but that doesn’t stop him from being blind to the abuse around him.

Swansea is the most interesting because he’s simultaneously the most supportive of Anya when he finds out how she was treated, and acts as an antithesis for Jimmy through the second half of the story, but not necessarily for the right reasons. Swansea is a hard boiled middle aged handyman, good at his job but gruff and unwilling to open up. Daisuke is his intern and therefore partially his responsibility. On the outside this seems to annoy Swansea, but we eventually learn Swansea is more fond of him than most of the crew, likely because he reminds him of his kid. Once the ship is stranded and they open up the alcoholic mouthwash, Swansea gives up his 15 year sobriety and starts getting drunk on cocktails made using the mouthwash. This downfall seems to be done willingly, rather than a relapse of judgement, as in one of the most provocative scenes, Swansea tells us of his life as an alcoholic, the life event that scared him into sobriety and caused him to become a “good man”, getting himself a wife, kids, a job and a credit card. Revealed eventually is the feeling that these life goals never fulfilled him the way getting drunk with his friends did, with a devastating line about those days being blackout drunk on a sofa being the best of his life.

In this speech the story is holding a mirror up to Jimmy, Swansea is an awful human, but he was self aware enough to spend a lot of his life trying to be better, and when he finally spirals back down he’s not afraid to admit anything, he acknowledges that hes become awful and he likes it.. Jimmy is unable to look into the mirror the story brings up to him and blindly ignores the point trying to be made by Swansea, promising that everyone will make it out just seconds before pulling the trigger on him. An empty hollow promise that only Jimmy is delusional enough to believe at this point. Including a foil to Jimmy and showing what a little sniveling shit he is to his face is powerful, but it’s also a selfish moment. Swansea does not protect Anya, he attacks Jimmy and doesnt seem to be emotionally effected by her suicide. Finding out Jimmy is a rapist lets Swansea justify indulging in dark, violent urges he has likely always had, or have at least been building up since the crash. He cares far more about what happened to Anya than a lot of the other crew members, but he uses her pain to justify violence against Jimmy, while doing nothing to prevent Anya from harming herself.

None of the men in Anya’s life are able to functionally protect or help her. Some are too inexperienced to know what’s going on, some are politicking to try to prevent a major on ship conflict and some are actively harmful to her while she is alive. Wrong Organ wrote a game about being forced to live in the skin of an evil manipulative little shit while he does things that make you scream while watching the woman who should be the protagonist have her companions fail her time and time again. It feels like the creators of the game have seen or heard of many instances of people in power failing victims because doing the right thing involves punishing someone in a way that they selfishly deem as inconvenient.

The game is incredible in most gamey aspects, the Art style is incredible, the other types of horror, such as the body horror are disturbing and uncomfortable, the music when used perfectly fits the tone. The biggest success is how the game manages to be a flashing neon sign for common abuse and manipulation patterns, getting inside the head of a narcissist and yelling at you that inaction enables the abuser and silences the victim.