Played Mouthwashing
I've been trying to play more short narrative games recently. Someone told me that Mouthwashing was short, so I picked it up and finished it in one sitting. It rocked. Highly recommend it to anyone looking for an incredibly dense narrative or horror experience.
I really admire short games which can maintain a super high cool-shit-per-minute ratio. It feels like a game made with only the best ideas its team could come up with, and very little fluff to pad it out - a direction choice I must only salute. When I completed it, I was stunned to realize that it had taken me less than three hours. It contained the same number of wild choices as many games twice as long.
I was particularly impressed by the game's relentless asset and location reuse. Almost every single prop object used for set dressing or interactivity in the game is reused in multiple scenes, and in multiple different ways. The plot involves the crew of a space ship trapped for months in only five or six different rooms, so every location is redressed many times over the course of the game. This incredibly strict focus gives a lot of mundane objects a strong thematic resonance. Fire axes, mouthwash bottles, cardboard boxes, televisions, and other objects appear again and again and again until their looming significance is enough to chill you all on its own. Visual motifs recur as well. And a couple interactive sequences are reused effectively, too - though I couldn't describe how without ruining the surprise.
There were precisely two interactive sequences I got tired of before they finished, but they weren't so difficult to figure out. I'd say that if you ever get stuck with something for more than three or so failures, just look up what the secret is - there are plenty of quick explanations online which won't spoil anything for you.
The game is so dense with cool visual tricks and structural decisions that I think you should just go play it if this is sounding fun to you. I'm not a super-eager player of horror games generally, but I liked it quite a lot. It has only a couple jumpscare-adjacent moments, and most are telegraphed in a way that made them quite tolerable for me... and most of the "gross" stuff in the game isn't that unpleasant to look at (though quite a lot of the stuff that happens offscreen is very disturbing).
If you've played the game already: I'm going to talk spoilers in the next link! Do not click it if you ever want to enjoy this game! Come back and read the contents of this link when you are done! Playing this game only takes two and a half hours!