Mouthwashing has been gripping fans online with its terrifying space-faring plot and bizarre,
The viral horror game from the Swedish development team Wrong Organ is picking up steam online, telling a non-linear sci-fi narrative about a group of marooned space freight workers.
Mouthwashing takes story cues from games like Silent Hill 2, following its main characters as they descend into madness, with the player being able to do nothing except watch it happen.
The Mouthwashing Plot Explained
Things go from bad to worse throughout the roughly two-and-a-half-hour story of Mouthwashing.
The viral PC game centers its plot around a stranded crew of the space-faring freighter vessel, The Tulpar.
After the team of intergalactic workers grunts "accidentally" crashes into an asteroid, things get messy, as the team has to grapple with potentially being stuck forever amongst the stars.
This progressive descent into madness is cut up into story segments taking place sometimes weeks or months apart from the last.
The Crash
The game starts as the crew of the Tulpar, captain Curly, co-captain Jimmy, medic Anya, mechanic Swansea, and intern Daisuke collide with an asteroid while transporting cargo through space.
The impact from the asteroid has made it so most of the ship's resources are bing blocked by a wall of thick white putty, and the crew is going to have to survive with what they have while racing against the clock to escape the Tulpar.
Immediately, things are dire. Upon impact, Curly sustains near-fatal injuries, making it so he is unable to walk or talk. The team decides because of just how bad shape Curly is in that they subdue their captain, putting him on life-support via a skimpy supply of valuable painkillers.
Being co-captain when the crash happened, Jimmy claims captaincy now that Curly is down. He blames the crash on his former superior and takes hold of any semblance of authority that remains among the crew.
The Mouthwash Enters the Picture
Two months go by and the game next picks up with the crew still trying to survive aboard the Tulpar.
Running out of food, the crew decides it is time to break into the confidential shipment they were put in charge of to, hopefully, uncover some potential supplies that may prolong their existence floating out in space.
They tear into their mysterious cargo to find they are transporting nothing more than massive crates of mouthwash (hence the name of the game).
While not quite what they would have wanted, the mouthwash will work. Being packed full of sugar and ethanol, the crew begins living off of these newly uncovered mouthwash stores.
However, things do not go quite as planned, as, because of the high alcohol content in the ethanol-based breath freshener they all enter a state of never-ending drunkenness.
Tensions rise among the crew as they become more and more intoxicated just trying to stay alive on a diet of mouthwash and dwindling food scraps.
As tempers flare, Anya eventually has enough, locking herself in the medical bay and swearing the rest of the crew off. In an attempt to retrieve Anya, Jimmy drugs Swansea, who had come to the aid of the former medic, and coerces Daisuke to climb into the ship's ventilation system to bring Anya back.
In the vents though, Daisuke becomes severely injured, being forced to retreat back to Jimmy and Swansea for treatment.
While Jimmy seems to think mouthwash will work as an effective disinfectant, Daisuke's injuries prove too much for him, getting infected and forcing some extreme measures to be taken.
Seeing what is happening to his crewmate, Swansea takes it upon himself to put Daisuke out of his misery. He reluctantly kills the young intern with a fire ax, before pointing a finger at Jimmy for sending him up into the vents to begin with.
Going Back to the Beginning
Mouthwashing's winding plot then jumps back to before the crash ever happened. This flashback sequence follows the crew in the days before they collided with the asteroid that left them marooned in space.
During this time, it is revealed to Curly that the crew is to be laid off after this shipment comes into port. Curly breaks the news to the rest of the team, heightening tensions between crewmembers.
It is at this moment that word comes out that Anya is pregnant and Jimmy is the father. Anya also heavily implies that she never meant to sleep with Jimmy and was raped by the Tulpar co-captain.
In a bout of stress-induced rage, thanks to the discovery that Anya is pregnant and everyone on board the Tulpar is about to be fired, Jimmy takes control of the ship, crashing into the asteroid responsible for the game's stranded in space premise.
This comes as Mouthwashing's big reveal, as the player discovers that not only did Curly not crash the ship as Jimmy had said, but it was Jimmy himself who doomed the crew to near-certain death.
A Final Confrontation
Jumping back into the present Mouthwashing centers again on Jimmy as he attempts to break Anya out from behind the locked Med Bay door.
After weeks of trying, Jimmy finally pries the Med Bay doors open, only to find that Anya has killed herself by way of an overdose of what little medication they had left on the ship.
Angry that he could not get to Anya sooner, Jimmy goes after Swansea, killing him with a revolver he finds aboard the Tulpar. In Swansea's final moments, he calls his assailant a coward and a weakling, blaming the former co-captain for the crew's misfortune.
With everyone else on the ship dead (except Curly, who remains on life-support), Jimmy's sanity rapidly declines. He begins to hallucinate, seeing visions of his former crewmembers embodying pieces of his very own psyche.
As a part of these visions, he sees the crew verbally abusing him for his actions and, in one particularly, gruesome sequence, he even envisions cutting off and eating Curly's leg to desperately satiate his insurmountable hunger.
Coming to for a moment, Jimmy realizes what he has done. He then moves Curly to the ship's lone escape pod, placing the still-alive captain into cryosleep, and sending out into the cosmos.
With Curly gone, Jimmy finally turns the revolver on himself, selfishly considering himself a hero for saving his captain's life. The game ends with Curly's pod floating in space, leaving his fate completely ambiguous.
Mouthwashing is available now on PC.
