We’re nearing October, and with that, my favorite time of the year: the handful of weeks when I’m just bombarded with new horror games to tackle. With Silent Hill 2‘s remake out on the horizon, as well as brand new releases such as a new Five Nights at Freddie’s and The Ten Bells, I’m looking forward to a scary and fruitful season. It’s time to tackle something a bit different, though. Something a lot more bizarre. Developed by the brand new indie studio known as Wrong Organ, Mouthwashing might simply be one of the weirdest games I’ve played in a long, long time.

The game is set aboard a cargo freighter. Hear me out on this nonsense: for some odd reason, the captain of this ship decides to turn it towards a meteor. As a result, it will doom everyone onboard to a slow and painful death, as food and air will run out over the course of the following months. The captain is in critical condition, the crew is struggling to survive, and it seems that the only thing available is a bottle of mouthwash.

I simply don’t know what to make out of this.

I don’t want to spoil the storytelling in Mouthwashing. All I want to say is that it is wild. What the hell did I just experience? It constantly jumps back and forth throughout a timeline; just as you feel like you’re reaching a big revelation, boom, you’ll be sent to a totally different point in time. A non-linear storytelling structure is hard to pull off correctly, but I think it works well in Mouthwashing, all due to its presentation and style.

All of this helps make Mouthwashing have this uncomfortable edge from start to finish. I wasn’t quite sure where the story was going and what was going to happen next. In one moment, your crew will be losing their collective minds, arguing and causing a lot of conflict with each other, then it will snap to a peaceful moment before the incident. As time goes on, each survivor becomes more and more unhinged, and the non-linear storytelling subverts itself in the best of ways without ever becoming an annoyance.

Even though not a lot happens, I was always on edge. For the most part, this is your standard walking simulator horror fare, where you’ll explore a relatively small cargo ship over the span of a few weeks. In terms of gameplay, sure, the game does very little to innovate. It makes up for it with its pacing, solid scares, and atmosphere. It only lasted for a couple of hours, though. Short but sweet, never outstaying its welcome, coming to a close just as it really needed to. Everything kept moving at a solid pace.

I would say it’s a really crappy situation.

There’s a bog standard stealth section and a couple of chases to help mix things up in the second half that are functionally okay but are brief enough. Unfortunately, there’s not much in the way of puzzles as well which would have helped add a little bit more variety into the first half. Some moments just drag on for a little too much. Mouthwashing doesn’t dare to stray too far away from being an exploration horror, and maybe that’s for the better, as it’s one hell of a psychological experience.

Mouthwashing boasts one of my favourite trends in horror games: a retro-styled graphical presentation, reminiscent of the PS1, just like games like Signalis and Crow Country; they have also nailed in this regard. It joins the group with low-resolution, but excellent visuals, and a superb filter that just gives it that iconic sensation that this could have been a hidden gem from back in 1999. Sound design is also very interesting; there is actually no spoken dialogue in the game at all. Interactions are all text-based. However, you will often hear muttering, screaming and other noises from around the ship. It’s surprisingly effective and drives home the more horrifying moments in Mouthwashing as the crew collectively loses their minds.

Feel weirded out already? Imagine playing it.

When I mentioned that Mouthwashing may be one of the weirdest things I’ve played in a while, I definitely did not mean it in a bad way. Its bizarrely unique structure pushes what would have otherwise been a bog-standard horror title to the next level of unsettling. The plot is wild, the scares are effective, and the weird presentation just kept me on edge. It’s not perfect by any means, with the gameplay feeling bland and some attempts to mix things up falling flat, but I had a pretty good time with it. An easy recommendation for fans of dental hygiene and utterly unsettling psychological horror.

Mouthwashing is available now on PC.

Reviewed on PC with an RTX 4070, Ryzen 7 7800X3D and 32GB RAM.

A copy of Mouthwashing was provided by the publisher.