MOUTHOLE

MOUTHOLE is a surrealist exploration video game and “drug addled nightmare” simulator developed by Anything Nose Studios, a development studio that was active over in Wales. That’s basically the most I was able to find in terms of their history, development or otherwise sadly other than the fact they shut down after the release of MOUTHOLE. How did I encounter the game however? MOUTHOLE was a game where I wasn’t really sure where I heard about it to be honest, it could be from any specific location. It could’ve been a buddy on Steam wishlisted it, it could’ve been through the cesspool that is Twitter, it could’ve been through Bloody Disgusting’s game recommendations list. Whatever the case, I was attracted to the title through its surreal nature that reminded me of the likes of OK/Normal, LSD Simulator and Cruelty Squad and the fact that it honestly seemed like a horror game through it’s surreal nature itself. Originally I was going to stream this for a friend of mine on Saturdays but my G Jinx didn’t really feel into the game so I ended up streaming it for my dude the Big G on over the past two Wednesdays or so due to it’s sheer length and the amount of endings/interesting unlockables to find. For those who don’t wanna read a novel, the game is good and I like it a lot. If you wanna read why I like it, look below. Plot/Sound Design/Art Design: https://backloggd.com/u/gamemast15r/review/3472416/ The gameplay for MOUTHOLE is rather unique in the fact that you can’t totally pin down what exactly the gameplay IS persay. A lot of it is choosing what to do with your time at home, like if you want to brush your teeth for an hour or fix your TV for four hours and with that in mind, you only have a certain amount of hours per day over a total of five days. You think that the time management aspect would actually be frustrating or annoying but I never really found it to be a big deal considering how much stuff there is to do. It’s not just that, want to jump on a trampoline? You can. Wanna focus on watering your plants? Do it. There’s a lot to do and a lot of ways you can go about how you spend your next five days. You might think, this sounds boring right? It can, BUT everything changes when you grab the sponge from the shower and then clean up the mirror in the bathroom on the top floor. Once you do that you gain the ability to [spoiler] “crawl into your mouth” and that’s when it gets REALLY weird, in ways that are completely fascinating. First things first, time stops in all of these worlds and the shop so you don’t have to worry about losing time anywhere except the house specifically. Next there are five “holes” you can get content from in your mouth: the first one would be the “Mesa”, which is automatically open and brings you to a desert world for which you’ll definitely come back for content later. After grabbing a key, you can open up a door downstairs in the house to grab some TV Plugs in order to fix the TV to open up the Static TV world in your mouth. Go in there, buy the lockbox key after grabbing two to three coins throughout your journey to open the lockbox in the Static World and use that to grab a manual which you can fix up a door in the basement in the real world. From there open it up to open up the door world which will lead you to the ability to turn yourself into a car. Why can you turn your body into a car? Who the hell knows, but it allows you to drive fast everywhere and leads to different variations of dialogue and top speed at the expense of brakes that are hard to manage (hold Shift I believe or press ESC to hard stop). I managed to jump over a large gap into a small ass church after getting into the Uvula Hole (which has you tickle it twenty times to where you can shrink yourself) and ended up grabbing an artifact that killed the driver of the car world to be able to race his ghost in the Mesa World. You wanna jump out of the map on the trampoline? You can find a secret hidden maze which allows you to find a special hat and a cheat code. That’s right, there’s cheat codes you can type in and find around the world as well, and it’s free![/spoiler] Why am I giving you a spoilery tutorial? Because the natural sense of progression in this game feels both out of the box yet strangely logical once you get into the pattern of everything. Want to [spoiler]open up the green gunk hole in your mouth? Clean up your kitchen with three separate chores over three separate days.[/spoiler] Anything and everything can lead to a new discovery, new avenues of weird s h i t that’ll lead you to laugh like hell or question what’s even going on. Each ending has their own summary at the top, while the rest of the endings describe how you spent your time, how much money you made and more which makes each individual playthrough unique and interesting. In one playthrough I managed to get robbed by a guy in the TV Static world, and in another I accidentally killed Bob the Worm with a glove he’s been looking for and it made me extremely sad because he’s surprisingly a heartfelt guy. The amount of random stuff that goes on (which can also be tracked via a special value meter you can find out about when you get all the endings) is astounding and the random things that you find in your exploration make this a fascinating game. There isn’t much else I can say except I would highly suggest for people who want a deeply surreal and strange experience: go play this game now and enjoy how weird it all is as it’s a unique game that not too many people have captured the vibe of. After the release of MOUTHOLE, not a lot would seem to happen, or at least not a lot would seem to happen publically. The only things I can find happen to be that MOUTHOLE would continue to get ported to other consoles such as the Playstation, Xbox and the Nintendo Switch which are awesome! From there they would continue the development of a game called Diacritic, a sort of puzzle game based around manipulating 3D shapes in space. However this would abruptly get shut down and taken off Steam? Why is that? Answer three: Anything Nose Productions announced that the company was shuttering. Why is it? I don’t know. All I know is that Diacritic is now considered a cancelled and lost game, and MOUTHOLE itself is now unavailable to play on Steam anymore, which I’m glad they listed for free as it allowed me to pick up the game myself as a hidden gem. From there it’s just static, nothing and it’s quite a shame as it would be nice to know what happened, and also it’s just a shame when things end in general. It makes me wonder however, if the Steam version is closed down and unable to be played, why are the console versions of the game still up along with Itch.io and such? I’m unsure, especially considering MOUTHOLE’s ports to consoles ended up happening literally ten to eleven days ago. Whatever the case is, while the developers might be no more, this game is freaky as hell and deserves to be played by more people so if you want to pick it up or if it slightly interests you? Do it. Links: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3219413266 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3261743942 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3485775194 https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2777740/view/516335345719052511 https://store.steampowered.com/app/2777740/MOUTHOLE/ https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/mouthole-switch/?srsltid=AfmBOop8jhWSbRo-Ad8vgvHKN_f_HZ--QQprfj8ALKpwt6CIpChsxWN5 https://anythingnose.itch.io/mouthole https://delistedgames.com/anything-nose-productions-closing-down-mouthole-made-free-until-its-delisting-on-steam/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3481650/Diacritic/ https://x.com/anythingnose?lang=en https://anythingnoseproductions.bandcamp.com/album/mouthole-soundtrack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09f4odZW2h4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZEX5IeTNwI https://anythingnoseproductions.bandcamp.com/album/mouthole-soundtrack