Games Like Mouthwashing: Short Psychological Horror

Paratopic is the closest in how it tells its story: a short, grimy trip through a low-poly world where you smuggle tapes, hunt a bird with a camera and wait to kill a man, as the game cuts between scenes and lives without warning. Iron Lung shares the isolation and the claustrophobic vessel: sealed in a windowless submarine at the bottom of an ocean of blood, you steer by coordinates and see the outside only in slow, grainy photos, in under an hour. That Which Gave Chase is the other close match: in a grainy PS1 look you drive a dog sled across an empty arctic with a grinning scientist behind you, and abrupt cuts leave you unsure how much time has passed, all in under an hour.

THRESHOLD comes from Critical Reflex, Mouthwashing's publisher, and shares its low-poly look and slow, choking dread: alone at a decaying border post high in the mountains, you blow a whistle to keep an endless train on pace while every breath costs you, told not to look in the train. A first play takes one to two hours, and your choices lead to very different endings.

For the slow breakdown of a mind in isolation, No One Lives Under the Lighthouse makes you the new keeper on a small island, lighting the lamp each night while the place grows quietly wrong, and the free You Will Not Remain keeps you indoors for so long the days blur, with a creature over the city and only a strange dog for company. Sagebrush is a quieter kind of aftermath: alone at the abandoned New Mexico ranch where a cult ended itself, you read and listen your way into why they followed their prophet, in one to two hours. Lake Haven: Chrysalis starts as a detective's routine welfare check and opens into a surreal world of rotting flesh and unexplained dread.

Guilt is the engine of Mouthwashing, and of DISTRAINT: a young man seizes an old woman's home to make partner at his firm, and his world turns grim and grotesque around his regret, over about two hours; DISTRAINT 2 follows the same man, Price, deeper into a world built from what he sold, in another hour or two. The free The Windows Are Gone starts from guilt too: after a fatal accident a house from your dreams calls you in, and the rooms you furnish slowly turn dark. Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk puts you inside a troubled girl's head for fifteen minutes, and two free games go darker still in very little time: Paper Cages turns getting up and going to work into a fight against your own willpower, and the static speaks my name follows a man's last night alive, with explicit handling of suicide.

To see where Mouthwashing's makers started, play How Fish Is Made, Wrong Organ's free first game: about twenty minutes as a sardine flopping through a dark, fleshy fish-processing machine, asked by every fish you meet whether you will go up or down. It is grotesque and darkly funny, with the same grainy low-poly look.

If you want something longer, Signalis keeps the lo-fi look, the cosmic dread and a story about memory and loss over about seven hours of survival horror.

If you only try one, play Paratopic for the closest feel, or Iron Lung for the same isolation in under an hour.

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