Introduction:

This assignment, while being very fun was also very difficult for me. Mouthwashing as a game has very complex themes and very dark symbolism which is portrayed throughout the game. It was a very powerful game and because of that I wanted my writing to reflect that. I had to do a lot of research for this essay this included replaying the game entirely, analyzing specific moments of the game and implementing my own interpretation of it into my writing. I did research on sexual assault and how it impacts women’s mental health, this being a big topic I wanted to touch on in my writing and presentation. In addition to this I wanted to share why I loved the story telling of this game and why as a horror fan myself I loved it. For this essay something I would have wanted to work on is being able to polish my writing a little better. With the deadlines I feel as though I wasn’t able to write it as in depth as I would have liked to but I think the overall essay is what I wanted it to be in the end.

I hope this hurts… I hope this hurts, I hope this hurts, I hope this hurts. You start in the cockpit of a spaceship. The ship’s controls advise you to steer left in order to avoid collision;  you steer right. Walking through the eerie hallway, pipes steam up and lights spark as the ship starts to break down. Running through this maze of a hallway, red lights flash along with the piercing sound of an alarm. You build up a sense of paranoia and anxiety while hearing the sounds of screaming babies and pony mascots obstruct your exit. The game glitches. 

You are transported to two months after the crash. 

Mouthwashing is an indie psychological horror game created by game developer “Wrong Organ.” A devastating crash leaves the ship’s captain Curly, disfigured and mutilated, with all of his limbs amputated. Jimmy, the co-pilot is forced to take leadership of the crew. The game is set in a dystopian future where they work for a company called Pony Express. They ride in a long haul space freighter called The Tulpar in which their mission is to transport unknown cargo. We can think about it as an interstellar UPS. The rest of the crew consists of the characters Swansea: the engineer, Daisuke: the intern and Anya: the nurse. The Tulpar collides into an oncoming asteroid causing a catastrophic crash that leads the vessel floating into deep space. As the audience we are left oblivious as to which member of the crew crashed the ship and why. 

  The game uses nonlinear storytelling consisting of jumping between two main timelines, weeks before the crash and the events which happen after. For events before the crash the player plays as Curly himself, while after the crash you play as Jimmy. We see the pre-dynamics of the ship’s crew prior to the crash as well as the deterioration of the crew after it. With the crew running out of resources they plan on unlocking the ship’s cargo in the hopes that they are transporting something that will help them stay alive. It turns out the crew is shipping thousands of bottles of mouthwash. This turns out to be unhelpful as it contains too much alcohol to quench thirst, too much sugar to disinfect and too little nutrients to sustain them. Throughout the game we see the only use the mouthwash serves is to make the crew, specifically Swansea very drunk. We see the crew descend slowly into madness. 

 A central theme shown in this game is the inability for Jimmy to take responsibility specifically with the focus of him raping Anya. Despite this the main focal point of the game leans toward his guilt for disfiguring Curly. As the game goes on there is a countdown leading up to Jimmy’s judgement day. He hallucinates about his dead crewmates and as players you are forced to feed Curly a large chunk of his own leg. This grotesque scene is meant to demonstrate to Curly his own pain and failure to look after his crew as a captain. This cannibalism is a metaphor for self destruction which is shown through every member of the crew in Mouthwashing. Swansea gives into alcoholism as he completely loses control due to the realization of his own demise. He drinks his worries away. 

Anya’s rape happens before the start of the game. The storytelling of the game purposely makes her rape a background event because the narrative is being shown through the eyes of Jimmy. The choice to make the rape a minor event is controversial due to how many people criticize the use of rape in entertainment because they believe it isn’t taken serious enough. In Call A Monster What It Is: Rape in the Horror Genre, the author shares her hatred for the use of rape in horror movies in particular because of the fact that it is used as a source for shock value or to sexualize a woman rather than to show how frightening rape actually is, Browne states “If you’re including sexual violence in your horror movie because sexual violence is horrible and frightening, then for the love of God, make it horrible and frightening. Presenting the audience with sexualized, titillating depictions of sexual violence only serves to further perpetuate rape culture(Browne) .” Her take on this topic is very thought provoking and in the context of this game the choice to make the rape so invisible actually works because it effectively strengthens the seriousness. In addition considering the fact that the entire reason Jimmy crashed the ship because he was worried about how raping a woman would ruin his reputation is telling of his selfishness. This fact is ignored throughout the game with the focal point being how Jimmy is sorry for ruining Curly’s life.

Jimmy looks up to Curly but has an inferiority complex. He is insecure and jealous of Curly’s position as captain. He wants to be Curly. After the crash Jimmy essentially gets what he wants as he becomes the leader of the crew. Even though he has the authority he always wanted it wasn’t the way he had imagined it. He was greedy for power not realizing the way he hurt others in the process. In The Theme of Psychological Destruction Jancovich states, “Their desire to dominate the world was a psychological compulsion over which they had no control. Conversely, their domination of others often drove their victims into madness, or into questioning their own sanity (Jancovich 1-2).” This text was very interesting as it accurately highlights Anya’s slow psychological deterioration throughout the game. Jimmy doesn’t care for her as a person nor does he have respect for her; he is simply stuck in the illusion that he would save everyone from the crash that he caused. 

Throughout the game Anya’s role as a nurse was to take care of Curly and give him pain medication. She seems incompetent and unable to do her job. As a result Jimmy perceives her as incompetent. The player is manipulated to mirror Jimmy’s frustration towards Anya when the real reason she acts the way she does is due to the fact that she is afraid of him. The players have this false narrative towards Anya because we are playing the game through Jimmy’s eyes. We are also manipulated as players to believe Jimmy’s story and empathize with him despite the fact that he is the villain. 

In The Mental Health Impact of Rape by Dean G. Kilpatrick statistics show how rape impacts the mental health of a woman stating that, “The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there are approximately 96.3 million adult women in the United States age 18 or older. If 13% of American women have been raped and 31% of rape victims have developed PTSD, then 3.8 million adult American women have had rape-related PTSD.” and “30% of rape victims had experienced at least one major depressive episode in their lifetimes, and 21% of all rape victims were experiencing a major depressive episode at the time of assessment (Kilpatrick).” PTSD and depression are two big mental health struggles Anya faces throughout the game. While playing through the game Anya is very withdrawn and isolated. In scenes shown through Curly’s point of view we see that he was the only one she trusted. Jimmy would make inappropriate jokes and not take her job as a nurse seriously and rather than telling Jimmy to stop doing that, being that it wasn’t professional, he would often do those tasks for Anya. He tries acting as a mediator between them to avoid conflict rather than telling Jimmy that what he’s doing isn’t right. Although this shows his flaws as a leader he was the first one she told about the rape and seemingly the only character who took her seriously. Anya has a guilty conscience throughout the game not only because of what was done to her but because Jimmy acts like it never happened. She is isolated in her own feelings, after the crash because she has nobody to talk to about the fact that she is pregnant, and is stuck with the person who raped her. 

Anya’s suicide scene serves a powerful culmination of her trauma and isolation throughout the game. It appears as if she is trapped inside the medical bay where Daisuke and Jimmy go to try to help her. While talking to Anya from outside of the room it is soon discovered that she locked herself in there with the intention of overdosing on pills. She has lost confidence in any hope of being saved while simultaneously solving the problem of who would take the last remaining cryopod, this likely being Daisuke since he was the youngest on board and Swansea was saving it for him. For more context a cryopod is a pod that preserves a human body for up to 20 years giving them a chance to be saved. The other cryopods were destroyed in the crash. Her final choice solves the problem of the baby because either trying to abort it or going through the pregnancy would have been difficult, and through this she felt as though she was finally making a choice for herself. Something important to consider about this text is the fact that while talking to Jimmy this was the first time she spoke with clarity and certainty. An important quote by Anya is “I always believed that our worst moments didn’t define us. Didn’t make us beyond repair… make no mistake. This isn’t my worst moment… It’s the best one I’ll ever make(Mouthwashing).” This shows that she chose to no longer live in fear. Even if the crash had never occured being in a ship for a long period of time with the person who raped you would have still had severe mental consequences. She also points out how she should have killed herself much sooner which further proves this point. Throughout this whole scene Jimmy is more concerned with the fact that she is stuck with their entire stash of medicine and states that she shouldn’t go breaking down at every little hardship. In spite of the fact that his crew mate is about to kill herself Jimmy still minimizes her emotions when he was the one who caused the most harm to her and put everyone in the situation that they are in. Even after her death he still thinks that he would be the one who would save everyone, even though after Anya’s death the characters of the game start dropping like flies. 

Daisuke and Jimmy make a plan in order to get to the medical bay. This included Daisuke being coerced into climbing up a damaged vent from another room to get to the medical bay resulting in severe injury. Despite efforts to keep him alive Swansea decides to put Daisuke out of his misery by killing him with a blow to the head via axe. Enraged with anger over what he is forced to do, Swansea tries to kill Jimmy with the same axe because he blames him for Daisuke’s death. In the scene after this Swansea gives a very powerful monologue about his past and his addiction to alcohol. Regardless of how much he changed and fixed himself, got a good job and had a family he was still able to admit that he wasn’t a good person. In contrast he tells Jimmy that he is stuck in his own delusion and that he is a coward. Jimmy assentionally proves his point by repeating how he would fix everything, then shooting Swansea with a gun. 

The end of Mouthwashing after putting the only remaining members of the crew being Curly in the cryopod results in Jimmy shooting himself in the head. He talks to Curly and believes through this act he is being selfless and owning up to what he did to Curly while still remaining willfully blind of his actions towards his other crewmates especially Anya. 

Although both characters committed suicide Jimmy kills himself out of guilt and cowardice while Anya kills herself quietly but with rage, her death fueled by isolation, betrayal and the unbearable weight of being silenced and ignored. The game ends with the player being in the cryopod through the eyes of Curly. A loud gunshot is heard in the background as the cryopod starts to steam up and the credits begin to roll. As the game ends you begin to wonder what was going through Curly’s mind during the events of the game. He wasn’t able to speak but he witnessed Anya’s death as he was locked with her in the medical bay. Does he wish he could have done things differently as a leader? And more importantly what would he be waking up to while carrying the weight of what happened in the Tulpar?

Citation: 

CAMPBELL, REBECCA, et al. “AN ECOLOGICAL MODEL OF THE IMPACT OF SEXUAL ASSAULT ON WOMEN’S MENTAL HEALTH.” Trauma, Violence & Abuse, vol. 10, no. 3, 2009, pp. 225–46, https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838009334456.

Browne#molongui-disabled-link, Laura. “Laura Browne.” Survivors to Superheroes, 9 Nov. 2022, www.survivorstosuperheroes.org/call-a-monster-what-it-is-rape-in-the-horror-genre/. 

“‘The Theme of Psychological Destruction’: Horror Stars, the Crisis of Identity and 1940s Horror.” Horror Studies, https://doi.org/10.1386/host.6.2.163_1.

Wrong Organ. Mouthwashing. Wrong Organ, 2024.