Mouthwashing

If I had to describe this game in a word it would be [i]pretentious[/i]. Mouthwashing is an overly hyped game that takes the player into a tiny little travel through space with a small "family" that never gets home. The design and art choices behind the game are very charming and adds a lot to the atmosphere they're trying to set, same thing goes to sound and music choices. My issue with the game starts at the middle-to-end section of it. The story is engaging for the most part, but eventually everything starts to fall flat and we can clearly see that someone tried to compensate this with visuals that don't really add much to the narrative. [spoiler]Why am I walking around through a whole section of body horror over and over, for several minutes during the ending? What is that supposed to tell me, the player? Why must that be done again and again between chapters? Was that done to justify the "horror" tag? I honestly don't get it.[/spoiler] The game itself feels more like an interactive movie than an actual game, it's pretty "linear" (lol) in a sense. "Do this, do that, fetch this, use that". And that's it, the story unfolds and gets messier and messier without any proper interference or control by the player's hands. My issue with this whole thing is that I didn't really feel anything playing it, at all. If you want your game to be more like an "art statement" that brings you a message or something, then it should actually make the person playing it feel something other than boredom. Towards the end I was mostly confused because none of it made sense. At some point I actually questioned out loud "is all of this [i]really[/i] happening because of [i]that[/i]? (trying to avoid spoilers here). Like...? It was all just a bunch of overreactions that made no sense on top of underreactions from the characters involved indirectly and I kept thinking that despite everything, [spoiler]if you're in a vessel with a person [i]that[/i] unstable, would all of the people around said person just accept that and leave him to his devices without any kind of intervention? Considering he is putting everyone's life in danger? It just made no sense.[/spoiler] [spoiler]Logically speaking (and statistically too, considering real life events), only one person would've rip'd in that situation and it wasn't gonna be any of the men involved. And considering how the company they work for is portrayed, they'd only lose a few "credits" for it and could just call that a day, no? How am I supposed to believe the best solution to the mess he created was the one he came up with? No one on that ship stopped for a second to think about alternatives and no one on that ship stopped to listen to the only real victim there. Was it really only Jimmy that saw her as less than nothing? Cause I kinda feel like the game lowkey does that too. If that is a deliberate choice by the devs or not I'll never know.[/spoiler] It just felt messy and disrespectful. I could see that the devs wanted this game to be dark and profound, but it just turned out to be pretentious instead. It's not a bad game, don't get me wrong. But the whole thing could've been done differently, with different POVs, more dialogues, more insight, more thinking and plotting, like [i]real life people[/i] usually do. I just couldn't suspend my disbelief like [i]that[/i], because the game tries to be grounded too. There are no monsters, no fantasy, it's just people "trying their best". The main character makes no sense at all, none of his actions are justifiable and nothing that he does appeals to me in any way, he's just a whiny, overreacting, brainless pissbaby. And the fact that we, as a player, have no say in [b]anything[/b] that happens just makes this whole thing feel like you're also trapped in that ship with a bunch of morrons and you're actually being forced to "control" one of them. This should've been a movie, it certainly feels like one.