What goes down in this Steam Next Fest demo is too dark to put in a headline, but this PS2-style indie horror has my full and undivided attention

It only took 20 minutes with the Steam Next Fest demo for Mouthwashing to know I'd played by far the most messed up horror game of 2024 so far.

Before I explain any further, a quick content warning for both the game and this writeup. The game prominently features themes of suicide, cannibalism, alcoholism, and other subjects that could be seriously disturbing.

Imagine being stranded on a failing space ship in an uncharted region of space. Now imagine finding out that the captain of your space ship deliberately put you and your crew in this situation because he no longer wanted to live. Oxygen and food rations are rapidly dwindling, leaving you utterly helpless and with only a short amount of time with which to stew on your captain's betrayal and what seems like an inevitable and lonely demise. 

OK, pretty bad, right? Now also imagine cracking open the cargo hold and finding nothing but a thousand bottles of alcohol-based mouthwash and learning two terrible, terrible things: mouthwash is your only consumable resource, and the whole reason you were sent on this doomed expedition is to transport a bunch of product for a giant space corporation.

That's the premise of Mouthwashing, an upcoming narrative-heavy first-person horror game from indie studio Wrong Organ, which released the nihilistic and highly acclaimed indie horror How Fish is Made in 2022. Again, I played about 20 minutes of the demo and was left genuinely shaken by the intensity of the gameplay, visuals, and subject matter - not to mention the ending. I won't spoil anything, but I'll never look at a cake the same way again.

I won't do the developers the injustice of trying to dissect Mouthwashing's heady metaphors for soulless corporatism, but make no mistake, this game has some shit to say. The beginning of the demo might mislead you into thinking the game is just another run-and-hide horror game - and there's nothing wrong with that - but by the end of the demo you'll be questioning everything and everyone.

One thing that really impresses me about the Mouthwashing demo is its efficient use of character development to drive up the already astronomical stakes. Only having played the demo for half an hour, there was already the sense that every character had lived a whole entire life by the time I found them living what I can only hope is precisely the worst possible scenario in the entire universe.

The sparse but effective soundtrack and evocative PS2-era visuals only serve to underscore a feeling of dread that never stops escalating, almost at an exponential pace, through the end of the demo, at which point there's no escaping the feeling that things are about to get much, much worse as you succumb to the unimaginable consequences of only drinking mouthwash to survive in a leaky space ship lost forever in the black void of space.

I think this blurb from the game's Steam page does well to sum up: "In the space freighter industry, there’s a saying: 'Hope to die, or for goodness sake, pray that everyone else did.'"

Can't get enough of the best horror games? You're in good company.