Day 209 - Mouthwashing Part 2
Horror, Actually Sad, SPOOKY MONTH! ·
Skeeter’s Take:
Hey! Welcome back! This is a continuation of our review of Mouthwashing from yesterday! If you haven’t read that yet - I don’t blame you! You probably should start here, but I ain’t no copper! Do what thou wilt, or whatever.
This review will contain HEAVY SPOILERS for the game Mouthwashing. I’ll say it again - I recommend playing before reading our shitty take on the game!
I will try my best not to laboriously explain every plot point this time around. Should have called yesterday’s review a “re-telling”.
Anyway, I’ll catch you up on the important things, but the beautiful thing about Mouthwashing is that every little moment feels important. A throw away line could have huge implications on what the character is feeling in the moment. It’s one thing that Mouthwashing does very well: making the player unravel the mystery themselves. This plays very well with the non-linear storytelling. The whole game feels like a mystery. It naturally has the player investigating every line of dialogue to parse out exactly what is going on, and boy, most of the lines of dialogue matter in some aspect. Sure, some of it is just character color splashed on the scene. But even still, those small character moments add a single brush stroke to the complete narrative canvas each time they are revealed. It makes this game feel very hard for me to discuss without giving you a lot of the backstory - because that’s sort of the whole thing. The narrative is woven throughout the background. Sure, there’s a crash and people trying to survive in space. But that’s not what this story is ultimately about. It’s about people. It’s about their relationships and their struggles and their mental and emotional states.
Anyway, we last left off 5 months after the crash Daisuke running up to us screaming that he needs help:
I love how each time we go further in time from the crew opening the cargo bay we see the lounge and the ship have changed over time.
Two months after opening the cargo bay, we can see the crew has become increasingly less concerned with cleanliness. I also love the sheer amount of mouthwash bottles that are stacking up implying Swansea and Daisuke have been chugging the fresh breath maker. The small attention to these details really helps sell the whole package.
So, Anya’s trapped in the med bay and Daisuke needs our help to get her out. He’s worried that Anya might run out of… something? Honestly, the kid is just panicking. He’s not really good in high stress situations. Then again, neither is Jimmy.
We get to the med bay to find that Anya isn’t locked in the room. She’s locked herself in the room. Jimmy seems more concerned about the access to medical supplies than Anya’s safety, and she is saying some pretty concerning “Your friend might need you to reach out and check on them” things.
Jimmy and Daisuke head down to the utility room to try to utilize the vent to get to Anya. Yes, that same vent Swansea reprimanded Daisuke for trying to climb into saying it was very dangerous. Even Daisuke brings this up, but Jimmy is determined to make it work.
They find a drunk ass Swansea puppy-guarding the utility room. He’s still being Among Us Sus about letting anyone in, despite it being a literal emergency.
We fade forward in time - 8 Hours until Judgement. Daisuke is lying on a sleeping bag bleeding with Jimmy standing above him.
Jimmy keeps hitting them with his old classic line “I can fix this” while Daisuke is literally dying.
I’m sure you can, bud. I’m sure you can.
There isn’t any Isopropyl Alcohol left because Jimmy apparently used it all to make a cocktail, so they can’t even clean Daisuke’s wounds. Jimmy heads out to desperately search for a disinfectant.
I want to pause the plot summary for some quick thoughts.
Mouthwashing uses all sorts of cool tricks to show the mental sanity level of the character you are playing. This is one of my favorites:
This is the medical bay, except where Curly would normally be lying in his mummy-like state, it’s just a graphical error. It looks like my graphics card is about to kick the bucket. It’s a simple but effective technique and I love the little moments like this Mouthwashing has sprinkled throughout. It’s always with a purpose, too. I don’t feel like they just stuck some glitchy graphics in the med bay because it would be “cool” or “creepy”, but rather to show Jimmy’s declining mental state. There is a narrative reason for this as well, as they can’t quite let the player know what is or isn’t on the table at this point. It’s neat. Jimmy is searching for disinfectant. He comes across a gravestone in the hallway of the ship. I can’t make the name out, though.
With the dirt and flower, it’s safe to assume this is another Jimmy moment. The headstone has a symbol of the captain’s scanner. The grave disappears and opens the path to the cargo hold.
Distorted words keep flashing on screen. Something to the effect of “responsibility”. I believe this is to show Jimmy cracking under the pressure of all his, well, responsibility. It’s not subtle, but it is very effective.
Jimmy descends the long, blood-stained staircase into the cargo hold. Little does he know he’s walking directly into my least favorite section of the game.
The cargo hold area is a forced-stealth “Big-Scary-Monster-Going-To-Get-You!” section. Essentially, there is a giant horse monster that will kill you if you move when it’s alerted to your presence. The player just has to stand still when the monster pops out.
By all accounts, this section is very well made. The horse-monster only shows up in the scanner light, so most of the time the player is only catching glimpses of its mane and hair through the narrow view the light provides. Boxes of mouthwash jump and shuffle around as the monster moves. It’s a great effect and a cool way of letting the player know a general area for the thing they are avoiding. If this was in any other game, I might think it’s pretty great. And it is. Like everything else in this game, it’s very well made and well done for this kind of gimmick.
But to me, it doesn’t feel like it fits in Mouthwashing. We are nearing the climax of the story and shit is just starting to hit the fan. Then I have to take 7 minutes to run from a scary horse monster. It kills the momentum for me and doesn’t seem to fit the same tone as the rest of the game. At this point, I’m fully on board for the narrative walking simulator the game has presented itself as up until this point. I’m invested in the characters and their stories. I want to know why Curly crashed the ship, how Daisuke got injured, what happened to Anya, and to see Swansea dance again. I couldn’t give two shits about some stupid Seabiscuit, regardless of its titanic size! I already know that Jimmy is losing his mind, so this section doesn’t do anything to further that plot point. I just can’t see why this section is here. To me, it feels like they had this great story about loss, evil deeds, finding your place in the world, and the existential crisis of being, and then one of the devs’ 13 year old nieces said “This is even a horror game? Where are the scary parts, then, huh? I didn’t scream once.” and they added this in. It’s just so out of place in an otherwise well paced and mature look into real life struggles that are being amplified by these imaginary circumstances. The game is already horrifying! The very idea of being trapped on a commercial cruiser carrying only mouthwash, with little to no hope of surviving is fucking terrifying! Let that stand on its own! I don’t need to look at a creepy horse for a few minutes to feel scared! I just feel like I’m at Chuck E. Cheese! Agh! I know I’m making a big deal over a small moment, but it feels like a tiny scratch on a brand new paint-job: near flawless otherwise.
Also, if you are going through this section again (or even for the first time), and just want to get through it, you can run until the horse squeals. That’s your queue that the horse has been altered. You can just stand still until it goes away and keep running. I know this takes a lot of the suspense out of this encounter, but it is the quickest way through it that I’ve found if you just want to continue the story. There’s even an achievement for getting to the “disinfectant” (which is just Mouthwash btw) in less than 30 seconds. The achievement guide for this tells you to just cheat, and even then it sounds like it’s a bit of a challenge.
Well, we are back with Jimmy standing over a dying Daisuke with Mouthwash. Clearly Jimmy wasn’t paying attention when Anya said this stuff couldn’t be used medically, but then again… it’s Jimmy so he empties the bottle on Daisuke’s open wounds like it’s some magical elixir.
We are back 5 months after the crash. Jimmy is proposing we drug Swansea to knock him out and steal the key to the utility room. Nothing like drugging someone to get what you want! Any means to an end, amirite?
So, Jimmy and Daisuke head to the lounge to cook up an Isopropyl Alcohol/Mouthwash cocktail. I thought they were just trying to knock Swansea out, not kill him!
Well, Jimmy does add the Pony Express provided sweetener to the mix, so it’s not all bad.
Side note, one of my favorite little details is that you find the sweetener pack hidden under Daisuke’s blanket in his bed.
It’s little things like this that truly make Mouthwashing a masterpiece. This packet of sweetener could have been placed anywhere. The game could have made the player use the scanner to put the code in and generate another sweetener like we did with the cake. But no. The ingredient dispenser has been blocked off by emergency foam, and there isn’t any in the kitchen. Instead, the devs took that packet and deliberately placed it in Daisuke’s bed. Yes, it’s a direct call back to the kid loving sweets and asking Curly to place an extra in the cake, but it also implies that Curly (being the only one with access to the sweetener code) probably slipped Daisuke a packet of the sweetener since he knew the kid liked it so much. That warms my heart. There is so much to infer from just placing fucking sugar in a bed, but god damn, what a choice. This is a really good example of what the “essence” of Mouthwashing is. Small, deliberate choices that allow the player to infer a deeper meaning and story.
Also, I just realized Jimmy stole Daisuke’s sweetener to drug Swansea. He never asked to use it! The bastard. This is definitely the worst thing he’s ever done!
Jimmy and Daisuke head down to give Swansea the poison they’ve cooked up. But first we have to pause for a Skyrim moment:
(The video has this tagged as the Witcher 3 and I’m laughing)
With Swansea either dead or passed out, Jimmy and Daisuke open the utility room.
Side note - love the Utility Room key charm:
They find out that the utility room isn’t filled with foam. The emergency foam has damaged all but one of the lifepods, which Jimmy speculates Swansea was hiding for himself the whole time.
Jimmy continues ignoring warnings from Daisuke that Swansea said the vent is not safe. It feels like he’s trying hard to play captain without thinking like one. Daisuke, being the wide-eyed innocent kid who just wants to help, obliges and climbs into the vent.
Well, we already know how that went…
We find ourselves as Curly, one day before the crash. We have one objective: Find the Gun.
Instead, we find Anya. She is curled over her knees in the cockpit clearly looking distressed. Curly asks her about the gun, and she says she hid the case since she can’t open it. She tells him she’s pregnant. Curly says they can keep it off the logs.
Then he says something very… familiar… Very… Jimmy.
Curly says that he’ll talk to “him” and that they’ve known each other a long time. Anya says that she knows Curly would never give her the gun to protect herself, but she wanted to make sure “he” couldn’t get it. Curly leaves Anya on the ground of the cockpit.
We flash back to immediately after Jimmy doused Daisuke with Mouthwash. Swansea sees the kid clearly suffering and makes a tough call. Probably the correct call. But it certainly doesn’t feel good.
This moment is horrible, but also rules. Right before Swansea brings the ax down, the sound cuts out completely, leaving us to watch in silence as Swansea contemplates his decision.
It’s an incredibly effective moment.
Jimmy confronts Swansea about the lifepod and him “plotting” with Anya. Swansea has some choice words.
The player, as Jimmy, is then tasked to find the gun. We know it’s in medical thanks to Curly’s conversation with Anya in the cockpit earlier.
Unfortunately, this is where we find out Anya’s fate:
Oh, Anya. You deserved so much better.
Press F to pay respects.
F
Jimmy grabs the gun and Curly, shockingly still alive, starts laughing. As Jimmy exits the med bay, Swansea charges at him with the ax.
We find ourselves on the day of the crash, back in the shoes of Curly. We find Anya in med bay. She says she told “him” - most likely that she’s pregnant. “He” got mad and stormed off. Curly goes off to find this mysterious man.
I’m sure you’ve all already guessed. It’s Jimmy:
Curly tries to comfort Jimmy. He says the classic “I can fix this.” line. Jimmy tells Curly he’s also responsible for what happened here since he’s supposed to be the captain.
Oh and we finally see Curly pre-crash!
Jimmy says he’ll “Take care of it” as he heads into the cockpit.
We are immediately met with sirens and red flashing lights. We run down the hall to find Jimmy outside of the cockpit, cradling himself.
That’s right folks. We were here operating under the assumption that Curly crashed the ship. This whole time, it was just another Jimmy moment. Collapsing under the weight of his own actions, he decides to take the stupidest most drastic measures possible. Way to go Jimmy!
Curly runs into the cockpit and tries to try to save the situation just as the ship makes impact.
We fade back, playing as Jimmy. We are carrying Curly to the lounge where all our friends have already assembled!
Hey, wait a second. We’ve already had our one allotted birthday for this trip. Corporate is going to be pissed!
At least the cake looks nice!
After carving Curly’s leg off and slicing up a piece for everyone, Jimmy gives a nice little speech about enjoying days like this.
We fade out and into some red text that just says “Take Responsibility” and jump down into the vents of the ship.
The next section is pretty surreal. There are a few puzzles and some symbolic props. I won’t really try to explain it, but I will show some cool photos.
Eventually, we find Swansea. Oh, and a gun.
You can’t talk with him. You can only do what Jimmy wants.
As you fire, the scenery changes to the graveyard from Red Dead Redemption 2
Swansea and Jimmy play a game of cat and mouse through the maze of graves. Jimmy brought a gun to an ax fight, so he does end up winning.
We come back to Jimmy holding a gun and Swansea tied to a chair.
Swansea looks back on his life. He regrets chasing the things in life that he thought would make him happy. He ultimately concludes his drunk years where he didn’t have a care in the world, the best moments of his life. His accomplishments never felt like accomplishments.
He has some final words for Jimmy, too.
Then… Bang.
Jimmy walks through some weird hallways. He’s very sane. Don’t worry.
We eventually come to find Curly strapped up to some contraption. This is one of the more strange mini-games I’ve played before.
The goal is for Jimmy to feed Curly his own leg. This is supposedly how he plans on keeping him alive. To do this, the player must twist valves to rearrange Curly’s digestive tract to get the food to go to his stomach. The first time I played this, I had no idea what I was supposed to do, so I fed Curly his leg like 25 times just to have him throw it up again. Man, that was pretty brutal. I thought the game was wanting me to see Curly suffer again and again. And boy, did he. The game makes you grab his vomited up leg from his lap, manually open his mouth, and then open the inventory to feed him the leg every single time you fail.
Curly takes his meal and Jimmy turns to face a TV which shows him walking in space. He meets up with an on fire Curly:
Curly says “He’ll play the victim” and that Jimmy can keep being a “better man”.
Anyway, have you ever ultra-sounded a (presumingly) baby horse? Because I have.
I won’t explain further.
The player, still as Jimmy, finds themselves back in the vents for my second least favorite section in the game! I call it the Big Spooky Caterpillar Horse section. BSCH for short.
The complaints I have about this section are similar to the horse section from earlier, so I won’t retread water here. You just run from a “spooky” horse monster in the vents. Blah. This one isn’t as bad because you can just run through it, but man. Just tell me what happens! I don’t give a fuck about this stupid horse!
There’s more surreal stuff. I like this part. It was pretty and sad.
Jimmy makes his intent to save Curly known. That Curly is the better man than him. Forget Curly’s suffering, the man needs to live, damnit! Feed him his own leg! Take him to the only lifepod left on the ship!
Oh.
Jimmy did it! He saved Curly! He fixed it!
Truly the “Sunderland-type” protagonist we all look up to.
The player takes back control of Curly, now in the lifepod. Jimmy walks out of view. We hear a gunshot. That’s all we need to hear.
The cryogenic stasis kicks on in the lifepod. And the credits roll!
Let’s fucking go!
Now that I’ve diligently explained the plot, despite promising not to, I’d like to break it down a bit.
So, we have 5 crew members aboard a commercial freighter hauling mouthwash. We have Swansea and Daisuke, and while their stories contribute to everything, ultimately everything that happens boils down to Jimmy, Curly, and Anya.
There’s something I missed the first time through Mouthwashing. Sam was kind enough to point it out. Yes, Anya is pregnant with Jimmy’s baby. But it is very heavily implied that this was a non-consensual encounter. It’s really not spelled out explicitly for the player. Anya never yells “I WAS SEXUALLY ASSAULTED.” Instead, we see this story play out through Curly - the captain and long-time friend of Jimmy. And Jimmy, the abuser himself. Throughout Mouthwashing, Anya drops hints of wanting to protect herself. She asks Curly for locks on the doors to their rooms, we can infer that she asked about the gun for protection since she says she knows Curly won’t let her have it. She is constantly asking for help and security throughout the game, but it’s easy to overlook as inconsequential. Curly keeps trying to handle the situation himself. He probably feels some sympathy towards Jimmy since he’s a friend and ultimately wants to protect him, but completely fails in protecting Anya in the process. He keeps saying that they don’t need to report the incident and that he will “fix it”. His conversations with Jimmy aren’t productive in addressing the issue. It’s like he’s constantly trying to throw a Mickey Mouse band-aid on a gaping wound. “It will be ok.” “I’ll fix it”. But he never takes real steps in ensuring Anya’s safety. And Anya is trapped in a small confined space with her abuser for longer than a year with seemingly no way to protect herself and probably will have to deliver a baby on the freighter (Remember that talk where she asks how long the trip will be and Curly tells her around 8 months? YEAH THAT WAS IMPORTANT! God damn, this game is good.). Then Jimmy, I keep comparing him to James Sunderland since I’m still playing through Silent Hill 2, but god damn. Jimmy is a piece of shit. He constantly is running from his own actions and… Well.. responsibility. This is obviously a huge theme throughout the game. He never owns up to what he did. Instead him (and Curly) just keep trying to “fix” things without addressing the central issue: Jimmy.
Anya’s story is so tragic. She suffers abuse and just keeps on trying to live and survive the best she can. She makes requests from the captain that ultimately go unheard. Then she finds out she’s also pregnant and will have to give birth to a (forced) child in space only to find out that she has also lost her job. That’s enough to break anyone, and yet she never reaches for that mouthwash to try to run from what she’s up against. She faces her problems head on until they become too much to bear and she finds a way out. Godspeed, Anya. I hope you find peace.
All of this culminates in Jimmy panicking and ultimately crashing the ship. He doesn’t see a way out of this. I think this is his solution to not having to take responsibility and face the facts when they get back. Instead, Jimmy makes a selfish decision to doom 4 other people because he did a very bad thing and he doesn’t want to suffer the consequences. Fuck Jimmy.
Then he tries to “fix” what he’s done and redeem himself by giving a dying Curly a second chance. In an act that he sees as merciful, he dooms Curly to a life of constant pain and torture even if he does live.
Think about it. The Pony Express is shutting down. Do you really think they are going to send a rescue team out to save 5 of the last employees they have doing freighter runs? That company is cutting their losses at that point. Chances are very slim that Curly gets found floating in the middle of space. So, I ask you this, what happens when the life support pod runs out and he wakes up in 20 years? He slowly and painfully dies from either his wounds or hunger? Wow, thanks Jimmy! Really glad you feel better about yourself before you shot yourself in the head you little fuck! It’s worth Curly’s suffering!
There are a lot of other themes at play here too. Working a cog in the corporate machine, the meaning of life and where you find happiness, etc. I could probably write a really terrible essay about Mouthwashing, but these are daily reviews and I apologize, but I am tired and going to call it.
This game is amazing. I would be down to do a retrospect at a later date where we talk about the juice of the game and not just the plot.
Can’t recommend this game enough. Please check it out. This is the kind of horror I want to see and play. I love this shit.
Recommend: Yes
Replay Percentage Chance: 50%?
Time Played: ~2.5 hours total
Sam’s Take:
HELLO EVERYONE! I WILL BE TALKING ABOUT SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN THIS REVIEW I WILL ALSO BE SPOILING THE ENDING OF THE 2017 GAME PREY. LIKE I WILL SPOIL IT RIGHT AWAY. BE READY.
In Prey (2017), you wake up on a spaceship overrun by an alien lifeform called Typhon. The Typhon were being experimented on by scientists on the ship, escaped, and are now consuming the crew and using their bodies to multiply. It’s stated in-game that the Typhon lack mirror neurons, and therefore can’t feel empathy (this is not quite how mirror neurons work btw, but it’s okay, let the game cook). You run around the ship, reading emails, listening to audio diaries, and generally learning about how the crew got in this situation. Corporate greed caused research to move too far too fast. The advancements made by studying the Typhon could be used to teach a lifetime worth of skill (ex. The ability to be a grandmaster at chess) in seconds with a simple shot called a Neuromod. These Neuromods were of course only sold to the richest of the rich. Political tensions caused foreign death row inmates to be sent up to the station to be experimented on.
As Skeeter showed you all yesterday, Mouthwashing opens with a short bit of text explaining some very basic information:
It also expressed a single wish: “I hope this hurts”.
After playing Mouthwashing yesterday, I had some questions about the plot, specifically concerning Anya’s pregnancy. I wasn’t totally sure what happened between Jimmy and Anya, or why she was scared of him getting the gun. I just felt like I was missing something, so I did a little googling and found that, while never explicitly stated, it’s heavily implied that Jimmy raped Anya sometime before the events of Mouthwashing.
The evidence provided was pretty convincing, but I wanted to make absolutely sure before writing this, so I replayed the game today and that’s absolutely what’s going on. There are so many hints at this, and you can look them up yourself if you are curious, but I don’t want to go down that tangent so please trust me when I say this is not people reading too far into something. This is absolutely a plot point and if anything I’m dumb as hell for not realizing it on my first playthrough.
This made a lot of plot points click, like why Jimmy would go to such drastic measures (crashing the ship) to not make it back to earth. It also puts a dark twist on many of Anya’s dialogue, like her asking why the bedrooms don’t have locks, or calculating the number of months until the trip is done. It also really sharpens both Anya’s and Jimmy’s repeated lines, “our worst moments don’t make us monsters” and “I can fix this” respectively.
Not to mention that it makes Curley implicit in all this, since it is revealed later that Anya told him about what happened.
Prey starts off before the ship gets taken over on your first day at work. You do some basic tests that function as tutorials, before having to do different versions of the trolly problem. For some reason they seem very interested in how you would handle Ethics 101 situations for your work on-boarding. Throughout the game you run into “real” version of the trolly problem, one of the last living people on the ship was a war prisoner that kidnapped children. Do you let him go, or release the Typhon into his cage? The Typhon don’t, or rather can’t care about us, they see us as raw materials, the materials they can use to reproduce. In the game you can recycle old cans and springs to break them down into raw materials for crafting. The Typhon does the same to us.
The second half of Mouthwashing primarily focuses on Jimmy’s spiral into madness. Jimmy knows he’s fucked everything up, and he does feel bad. He repeats it over and over again, “I can fix this”. He can’t stand the idea of being the bad guy, or of other people seeing him as the bad guy. It’d be easier for him if he just felt nothing, if he could just do a bad thing and not care, but that’s not how we work. Even the worst of us have empathy. It’s in our nature.
The after credits reveal of Prey is that you are not a human at all. You are a Typhon being put through a simulation. The Typhon have already taken over earth, and the human’s only hope of survival is that putting a Typhon through a simulation “playing” a human (with the help of some Neuromods) would cause them to develop something like empathy, enough to coexist.
By the end of Mouthwashing, Jimmy’s actions have left everyone except Curley dead, and Curley is… not doing so hot.
Jimmy wants to feel better about himself. He wants, at the very least, to be able to see himself as a good person. He knows he cares, or course he cares. He carries Curley to the cryochamber, to save Curley instead of saving himself.
The last moment in Prey gives you a simple binary decision:
In any other game this choice would be absurd, but Prey just spent the last thirty hours proving that humans have empathy, an instinctual power of caring and understanding, and still regularly ruin each other’s lives. What is “evil”? Is it not having the ability to care, or having the ability, and choosing to ignore it.
Before Jimmy leaves the screen and shoots himself, he looks through the window of the cryo chamber and says “I fixed this”. When I hear the gunshot go off, there’s only one thing going through my mind.
Recommend: Yup
Replay Percentage Chance: Probably done now
Time Played: 5 Hours
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