Wrong Organ's Mouthwashing kept me guessing the whole time, even though I'm not a huge fan of space horror. From the beginning, it threw me for a loop with its peculiar title and startling introduction, as any good horror film should. You can sense the game's fascinating tone mixing from the beginning, setting the stage for a narrative brimming with interesting characters and strange occurrences.
The online horror game Wrong Organ, created by a Swedish development team, tells a non-linear science fiction story about a crew of stranded space freight workers.
As the crew of galactic laborers accidentally smashes into an asteroid, chaos ensues as they face the prospect of spending eternity stranded among the stars. A space freighter named The Tulpar and her trapped crew are at the heart of the plot of the popular PC game.
The narrative of this gradual spiral into insanity is fragmented into episodes that occur at irregular intervals, often weeks or months apart.
The story of Mouthwashing takes place on the Tulpar, a Pony Express, for three hours. One person plays the action game from a first-person view, and there aren't many ways to survive or fight. It's also possible to call it a walking game. The main parts of the game are exploring the Tulpar, talking to the crew, and using things to solve puzzles. Their ship is in the middle of a long trip through space to bring goods.
Mouthwashing gets ideas for its story from games like Silent Hill 2, whose main characters go wild while the player does nothing but watch and which lasts about two and a half hours, things worsen as the story continues.
The game starts with Captain Curly, co-captain Jimmy, Anya, the medic, Swansea, the mechanic, and Daisuke, the intern, taking goods through space on the Tulpar and running into an asteroid.
A wall of thick white putty from the asteroid impact blocks most of the ship's resources. The crew will have to make do with what they have while racing against the clock to escape the Tulpar.
Right away, things are terrible. Curly is badly hurt when he hits the ground and can't walk or talk because of it. Because Curly is in such bad shape, the team decides to restrain him and bring him back to life by giving him drugs that are running low.
Jimmy is now captain because Curly is out. He was co-captain when the crash happened. He says his previous boss is to blame for the collision and grabs any power left in the crew.
Two months have passed, and the crew of the Tulpar is still trying to stay alive when the game starts again. Since they are running out of food, they choose to break into the secret shipment they were in charge of to find supplies that will help them stay alive in space longer.
Their strange cargo is nothing more than vast boxes of mouthwash, which is why the game's name is derived from it.
The mouthwash will work, even though it's not what they wanted. The crew starts living off these newly found mouthwash shops because they contain sugar and alcohol.
Unfortunately, things don't go as planned because the ethanol-based breath freshener has a lot of booze in it, making them all drunk all the time.
As the team gets more and more drunk while trying to stay alive on mouthwash and what little food they can find, tensions rise.
As tempers rise, Anya finally has enough. She locks herself in the medical bay and tells the rest of the crew to leave her alone. To get Anya back, Jimmy gives drugs to Swansea, who had helped the former doctor, and forces Daisuke to go into the ship's ventilation system to get Anya.
Unfortunately, Daisuke gets badly hurt in the vents and has to return to Jimmy and Swansea for help. Jimmy seems to believe that mouthwash is a good way to kill germs, but Daisuke's wounds are too much for him, and they get infected, so drastic steps must be taken.
Swansea ends Daisuke's suffering after seeing what is happening to his crewmate. He unwillingly uses a fire axe to murder the young intern and then accuses Jimmy of being responsible for his incarceration.
After this, Mouthwashing's complicated story goes back to before the crash. This flashback shows the crew in the days before the crash, when they hit the rock that stuck them in space.
At this point, Curly learns that the workers will be fired after this shipment arrives at the port. Curly tells the rest of the group about the news, which makes things worse between crew members.
The news that Anya is expecting a child and that Jimmy is the biological father breaks simultaneously. Anya also makes it clear that the Tulpar co-captain raped her and that she had no intention of sleeping with Jimmy.
The revelation that Anya is pregnant and that everyone on board the Tulpar is about to be fired triggers a fit of stress-induced rage. During this, Jimmy assumes control of the ship and crashes it into the asteroid, which causes the stuck-in-space concept in the game.
In Mouthwashing, the player learns that Jimmy almost killed the crew and that Curly had nothing to do with the ship's destruction, as Jimmy had claimed.
Ultimate judgement
Once again, the focus shifts to Jimmy in the present day as he tries to free Anya from the barred Med Bay entrance. Jimmy gets the Med Bay doors pried open after weeks of attempting. Still, to his horror, he discovers that Anya has overdosed on the ship's meager pharmaceutical supplies and committed herself.
On the Tulpar, Jimmy finds a handgun and uses it to murder Swansea, who he blames for not being able to reach Anya sooner. Swansea blames the former co-captain for the crew's disaster and accuses his attacker of being weak and cowardly in his last moments.
In the wake of the ship's destruction, Jimmy's sanity quickly deteriorates (apart from Curly, who is still on life support). In his hallucinations, he sees elements of his personality reflected in the faces of his former crewmates.
Within these images, he witnesses the crew berating him verbally for his behavior. In one especially horrific scene, he even imagines severing Curly's leg and devouring it to quench his unquenchable desire.