Daniel Keast

Mouthwashing

Games I've Completed

This is a psychological indie horror game that is currently on sale on Steam. I played through it on the Steam Deck in a single sitting. It is quite short and very engaging. The game is first person, and mostly a walking sim style game. You explore the ship, talk to the crewmates, and solve simple puzzles.

It tells the story of a spaceship crew that have crash landed on a planet, exploring their personal struggles and their relationships. The opening really caught my attention. You are at the cockpit of the spaceship and intentionally cause it to crash. You then leave, and the game becomes hallucinatory in a similar way to P.T. After this you start playing from before the crash, as well as after. The game is told in fragments that are completely out of order.

There are multiple surprises in the story that I didn’t see coming, as well as some very creepy moments. It was quite an effective horror game, without ever having cheap jump scares. Instead it achieves this partly with the general tone, but also by never giving you a steady footing. Due to the disjointed storytelling people seem to act irrationally and out of character. Only later do you begin to understand why.