finally played mouthwashing

20250102

(spoilers ahead)

eh. it was fine.

just about every minute i was playing this game, i could not stop myself from shouting at the screen “we get it! you played silent hill 2!” the game loves to endlessly repeat the trick of “what if a hallway or staircase was longer than you expected?” to the point that i got completely sick of it. it took me less than two hours to complete but i was interminably bored by it after the first 20-30 minutes or so.

almost every setpiece moment in the game was either entirely uneffective for me to the point of hilarity or, occasionally, far beyond the level of upsetting i would ever want in a work of fiction. the entire time i was playing i couldn’t stop imagining twitch streamers and youtubers going “woaahhhhh!!! this is crazy!!!”

just about every interactive element of the game is a complete disaster: the inventory menu is awful, the little skeuomorphic interactions you have to do could be cute but are instead mostly clunky and distracting, and worst of all, every single time they give you some kind of weird little minigame with a failstate to complete it is inscrutable and awful.

and to cap off the silent hill 2 comparison, the big twist is that gasp the guy you’re playing as is actually a bad person, and all those long staircases are metaphorical for his descent into hell or whatever! give me a break.

compared to most other video games it’s more narratively and conceptually ambitious but god, that’s so condescending. i imagine it’d be surprising and enthralling to anyone whose main exposure to video games is like, big AAA slop.