This is my spoilers page for Mouthwashing!
Mega spoilers for the ending and all the plot twists of Mouthwashing
I was quite surprised to learn the game's final-act twist: that it is a game about either outright rape, or about a highly specific type of intimate partner violence. While Jimmy never raises a hand against his victim in overt violence, and while the game never even directly addresses his own thoughts on the subject, Anya repeatedly makes oblique suggestions that she did not consent to sex with him. Jimmy tries repeatedly to annihilate or control her, her context, or himself, in blind panic about the responsibility and culpability her existence creates for him. He never, ever speaks that out loud, not even in his own mind.
Our other perspective character is Jimmy's friend and enabler. The Captain is so completely unable to admit that his bro is a threat that he might even be editing Jimmy's obvious signs of danger out of a mental health report.
The game makes an incredibly specific critique of two types of dangerous men - a narcissistic predator, and his male buddy enabler - but it makes that critique so obliquely and indirectly that it's sometimes hard to tell what it's doing. In particular, I found the conversation with Curly and Jimmy outside the cockpit, immediately before Jimmy crashes the ship, to be pretty confusing. It was a crucial moment, it took me nearly a minute to figure out how I was supposed to be reading Curly's behavior. It was so muted and under-realized that I even wondered whether I was supposed to think that Curly was consenting to the crash. He isn't; he's agreeing, instead, to cover up a probable rape. It's a shame that this moment was the only one in the entire game that straight-up did not work for me.
Meanwhile, the latter half of the game is incredibly on-the-nose about Jimmy's hangups with responsibility, in a way I largely found productive; he dances with the fantasy of responsibility, finds himself pursued by it, and constantly searches for new ways to control how others might understand, criticize, or judge him.
Given the violence of a lot of the game's visuals, I was genuinely expecting the game to eventually depict a much more direct and primal kind of emotional intensity - characters screaming about their problems, maybe? But most of the intense stuff just happens inside Jimmy's mind. In real life, he hides a lot of what he's up to, and inflicts a depressingly realistic kind of harm.
The game is about someone who's narcissistically searching for ways to hide crimes committed offscreen, and to look good to others. It's about someone who is editing their own understanding of reality to look better and more heroic, no matter how much damage this causes. Jimmy's so careful about hiding evidence of his crimes that he literally deletes the evidence from his own field of vision.
Anyway, the game's also about a very specific type of bad adult behavior that you generally do not see addressed in videogames: the kind of bro who makes room for his predator friend. The two villains' flaws are so specifically circumscribed by social position and gender that by the end of the game, I kind of felt like I was looking at a pair of bugs in a jar. Curly's secret, when it was finally revealed, was so relentlessly ordinary that I was pretty surprised.
Anyway, I really appreciated this game. It has something so specific to say about a particular kind of (terrifyingly common) person. I'm so glad to see a horror game that explores such a muted and covert type of villainy. Good job, Wrong Organ. I'm excited to see more from you.
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