If you were to try to pick the best horror game of the 2020s so far, you’d have a very long list to choose from. Between multiple Resident Evil games, a successful revival of the Silent Hill franchise, and a slew of landmark indies like Signalis, the horror genre has been in a true renaissance over the past six years. The one game that sticks with me more than anything, though, is a three-hour psychological horror experience set on a stranded spaceship: developer Wrong Organ’s distressing Mouthwashing.
Mouthwashing became an instant cult hit when it was released in 2024, sandwiched between heavy hitters like Astro Bot and Silent Hill 2. Steady word of mouth helped it escape a busy season for big games and become Steam’s best-kept secret. Now, it finally makes its way to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X — just in time for Halloween.
It's also available on Xbox Game Pass starting today. If you’ve yet to play it, now’s the perfect chance to try a game that hasn’t left my mind for two years. Mouthwashing is a narrative-driven horror game set aboard a cargo spaceship.
After crashing into an asteroid, the ship’s crew is left stranded in space with dwindling resources. The crew mostly survives the crash, but one member, Curly, is nearly killed. The eeriest recurring image in a game full of them is Curly’s body, fully bandaged like a mummy with only a bloodshot eye poking out.
That story makes great use of a classic thriller setup: the tried-and-true cabin fever tale. Mouthwashing is largely a descent into madness, as the crew becomes increasingly more desperate as time passes on. It has shades of Cube, Vincenzo Natali’s 1997 horror film about a group of people stuck in a deadly structure with no clear way out.
While the cargo ship isn’t full of death traps, the brewing distrust and violence between crew members mirrors the tense social dynamics that rise out of shoving hopeless people together into a claustrophobic space. Mouthwashing's staying power as a horror story doesn’t come from any cheap jump scare, but from its inescapable psychological distress. Without getting into spoilers, the story uses every second of its three-hour runtime to slowly reveal the casual horrors that were happening onboard even before the crash.
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