The Bad Taste of Mouthwashing
Mouthwashing is an amazing game. I’m not normally a horror game person but Mouthwashing by Wrong Organ is a few marvelous hours of creepy disgusting, dare I say, art. But despite how great the game is, I experienced an extremely frustrating barrier while playing that left a bad taste in my mouth. Minor spoilers ahead.
Most of my play experience was easy breezy with clicking through dialogue and lite puzzles and stealth. Then I got a gun. As Mouthwashing descends into Dante-like madness, you eventually end up in a graveyard with a gun and must shoot a character trying to rush you. Physically, this requires you to hold down the right mouse button to aim down sights, aim, then left click to fire. This multi-input action is just too much for my tired, disabled hands. I died many MANY times before eventually pausing the game, and setting the record the world's longest sigh. Then off to the game’s settings I went to see if I could overcome this barrier to progress.
What I needed was the ability to rebind the right mouse button to a thumb mouse button or Tab to spread out the actions across my digits to lessen the load. Unfortunately, the ability to rebind inputs is absent within Mouthwashings settings. I then broke the record for the world's longest sigh. Alternatively to rebinding, a toggle for aiming down sights rather than holding the button down could be another way to overcome this barrier. Mouthwashing has no option for toggles.
At this point, I broke out the big guns, tabbing out, and booting up reWASD to create a system-wide rebinding. BANG, BANG, BANG, character shot, onward I descended. While I was able to overcome this barrier, morally, the labour of doing so shouldn’t fall on disabled people to buy external software to continue playing. Despite Mouthwashing being a brilliant game, I ended up feeling excluded. When a game has barriers to play, it is a reminder that my differences set me apart rather than inviting me to share in human experiences. Even if those experiences are darker than the winter solstice and leave a rancid taste in your mouth.
