Mouthwashing
The Summer of Demos : Day Nine
The good ship Tulpar has a crew of five hauling cargo with over a year chartered in deep space. After a crash ruins their supplies and all around decimates their odds of survival, the surviving crew decides to find out what their mysterious cargo actually is. Maybe it’ll give them a chance?
I’ve always felt a little off playing in first-person, as if I’m being stalked by some enemy just out of sight, and Mouthwashing banks on this. Cutting between scenes with a disk-skipping sound, time isn’t linear and it’ll take some exploration to figure out when and where you are in the story, if what you’re seeing is even real. Outside of walking there’s light interaction with keypads and grabbing items to give to people, but most of your time is spent wandering down corridors and talking with the crew.
Typically a demo is a slice of the game it’s trying to promote, often the opening hour or first few levels. This demo could be its own half-an-hour game with a complete, if open-ended, story where you play as the captain of a doomed ship. You’ll come to know every character well by the end of the demo and I dread to think what’s going to happen to them in the full game.
In a word : clean.
Mouthwashing is a first-person horror game developed by Wrong Organ and published by Critical Reflex for PC via Itch and Steam, coming soon.
This article is part of the Summer of Demos series, where I’ll be releasing a Demo Diving preview article each day in July. If you liked this article, be sure to share it with a friend or enemy. If you back me on Patreon, you get access to articles one day before they release anywhere else. If we reach £25/month before the end of July, I’ll extend the Summer of Demos into August.