A Bad Taste In My Mouth
Feb. 22nd, 2025 10:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
utilitymonstergirlThis book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body.
—Studs Terkel, Working
I finally played the indie horror sensation Mouthwashing, and I think I would've liked it more if its scope was either a little smaller or much bigger.
To be clear, there's a lot to like about Mouthwashing as-is: the blend of lowpoly models and dithering requires you to get uncomfortably close to make out fine details. It's neat to see retrofuturistic sci-fi that evokes the 70s, albeit mostly by way of The Shining and Alien. It's got wonderfully striking setpieces in isolation — the trouble is the game's identity crisis about how theatrical it wants to be.
Theater is an underdiscussed influence of these narrative-heavy, mechanics-light games. Both mediums are well-suited to playing with what is and isn't diegetic, and can tell stories with a vividness unavailable to film or prose. But like the songs in a musical, the gameplay in such a game needs to tightly complement the story and themes or else it's a pace-killing slog.
1000xRESIST was made by a multimedia theater troupe that pivoted to gamedev during lockdown, and the influence shows. Frequent changes in presentation, both diegetic and not, are all in service of a story about everything that never loses sight of why it all matters to the cast. It is a ten-hour tour de force about diaspora, memory, motherhood, and the refusal of history to end. It is Sleep No More set in a posthuman selfcestuous micronation that cannot escape the shadow of Hong Kong.
By contrast, The Beginner's Guide is a short, intimate one-man show. In an hour and a half, you tour a series of microgames as the narrator tells the tale of violating their (fictional) creator's trust and boundaries. In one sense, it's clearly "about" Davey Wreden's emotional rollercoaster following the success of The Stanley Parable; he voices the trespasser and created the works of the trespassed-against. It inverts the Parable by being linear, achingly sincere, and focused on the impact of transgressing against a person rather than a game. But The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe Edition also handles this catharsis by sharply asking what you'd even want out of a sequel. Without any knowledge of Wreden's other work, the Guide can be enjoyed as a gut-wrenching story of suffocating love.
The broadest strokes of Mouthwashing are suited to a similarly small scale: five characters stuck in close quarters, with an outside world that only exists impressionistically. Much of it has a structure like Perfect Blue, a tightening spiral of the same motifs in increasingly grotesque combinations, and those parts are the highlights.
The problems arrive with the setpieces that are more on the scale of 1000xRESIST. Being chased by a monstrous vision of your company's mascot is especially jarring - the company is thinly-sketched enough for the scenes to kill the pacing for little benefit. It's a generically callous shipping company that isn't as funny, nuanced, or truly heinous as its inspirations, so the nightmares don't do much to characterize it. A year-long journey with a cargo of nothing but mouthwash would be a great bleak, surreal joke with zero context, or a magnificently deadpan joke if the game unfolded the full economic context behind it, but we're stuck in the lurch between them.
—Studs Terkel, Working
I finally played the indie horror sensation Mouthwashing, and I think I would've liked it more if its scope was either a little smaller or much bigger.
To be clear, there's a lot to like about Mouthwashing as-is: the blend of lowpoly models and dithering requires you to get uncomfortably close to make out fine details. It's neat to see retrofuturistic sci-fi that evokes the 70s, albeit mostly by way of The Shining and Alien. It's got wonderfully striking setpieces in isolation — the trouble is the game's identity crisis about how theatrical it wants to be.
Theater is an underdiscussed influence of these narrative-heavy, mechanics-light games. Both mediums are well-suited to playing with what is and isn't diegetic, and can tell stories with a vividness unavailable to film or prose. But like the songs in a musical, the gameplay in such a game needs to tightly complement the story and themes or else it's a pace-killing slog.
1000xRESIST was made by a multimedia theater troupe that pivoted to gamedev during lockdown, and the influence shows. Frequent changes in presentation, both diegetic and not, are all in service of a story about everything that never loses sight of why it all matters to the cast. It is a ten-hour tour de force about diaspora, memory, motherhood, and the refusal of history to end. It is Sleep No More set in a posthuman selfcestuous micronation that cannot escape the shadow of Hong Kong.
By contrast, The Beginner's Guide is a short, intimate one-man show. In an hour and a half, you tour a series of microgames as the narrator tells the tale of violating their (fictional) creator's trust and boundaries. In one sense, it's clearly "about" Davey Wreden's emotional rollercoaster following the success of The Stanley Parable; he voices the trespasser and created the works of the trespassed-against. It inverts the Parable by being linear, achingly sincere, and focused on the impact of transgressing against a person rather than a game. But The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe Edition also handles this catharsis by sharply asking what you'd even want out of a sequel. Without any knowledge of Wreden's other work, the Guide can be enjoyed as a gut-wrenching story of suffocating love.
The broadest strokes of Mouthwashing are suited to a similarly small scale: five characters stuck in close quarters, with an outside world that only exists impressionistically. Much of it has a structure like Perfect Blue, a tightening spiral of the same motifs in increasingly grotesque combinations, and those parts are the highlights.
The problems arrive with the setpieces that are more on the scale of 1000xRESIST. Being chased by a monstrous vision of your company's mascot is especially jarring - the company is thinly-sketched enough for the scenes to kill the pacing for little benefit. It's a generically callous shipping company that isn't as funny, nuanced, or truly heinous as its inspirations, so the nightmares don't do much to characterize it. A year-long journey with a cargo of nothing but mouthwash would be a great bleak, surreal joke with zero context, or a magnificently deadpan joke if the game unfolded the full economic context behind it, but we're stuck in the lurch between them.
Even the more plot-relevant vignettes can suffer from the same problem Pengy described in OMORI, with big wallops of "would that be fucked up or what" rather than quietly unfolding the more insidious horrors. Rearranging someone's guts (no, not like that) is already self-evidently gross and awful, but I want more of the restraint that Funny Games showed when it made a golf ball rolling into frame utterly bone-chilling.
I'm glad that Mouthwashing exists, and I'm optimistic that its creators will go on to make things that I feel more willing to praise. Given the stark, uncompromising vision on display already, I trust them to use the attention and resources well - either to make the over-the-top extravaganza of their dreams, or to polish a smaller experience to a mirror shine.
