Kai Moore, Jeffrey Tomec, and Johanna Kasurinen discuss their hopes and fears before launching the hit indie horror game and what happens next.

Mouthwashing was my Christmas 2024 game. More specifically, it was my last game of the year. Steam says I played it on December 31. Thinking about where my head was at last year and where it continues to be, it feels fitting. Fear not, I’m not as unstable as the Tulpar’s crew, but whew, the last 12 months or so have been a bumpy ride.

In many ways, Wrong Organ’s second game (don’t disrespect How Fish Is Made) feels like a perfect post-pandemic, early 2020s work of art. Everything’s fucked or broken. It takes incredible mental fortitude to stay sane when the world’s gone mad and capitalism is reaching its natural conclusion. We only have each other. Is that enough? This is the sort of sharp and well-calculated banger that newcomers seldom manage to knock out, but the Stockholm-based studio pulled it off, spawning a cult following in the process.

At Guadalindie 2025, I tried to better make sense of the creative process behind it and its remarkable success when I sat down for a 20-minute chat with Kai Moore (executive producer), Jeffrey Tomec (gameplay lead), and Johanna Kasurinen (narrative designer and art lead). This is what they had to say about the surprise success of the game, what their goals and anxieties were, and what the future might hold for the studio.

“From the beginning we wanted to stick to that style,” Kasurinen immediately answered when asked about Mouthwashing’s low-poly, PS1-like retro aesthetic. I’ve always felt it added – almost naturally – an uneasy vibe to most games of the era and their respective homages, even those who look playful and innocent. For horror, that’s ideal, and the art lead agrees: “I grew up playing games like Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot, and then horror titles like Silent Hill, so there’s an element of nostalgia to that choice. Other side of that was that I just hadn’t made any art before, any 3D models or anything, so that was just a style that was executable to me… But then I think it also really works well with horror because it brings a sense of uneasiness from the get into the project. I always say that there’s this very thin line between goofy and grotesque. You can start bringing in horror elements in a like much less suspension of disbelief manner than you would if you were doing really high, realistic graphics.”

Another fascinating part of the game is how much of it takes place inside the big living room during happy, sad, and terrible times. Whereas the Tulpar’s corridors evoke Alien and perhaps even Event Horizon, there’s a warmness to the living room, mainly due to the massive LED screen that offers some respite to these overburdened, underpaid blue-collar workers. “The sort of sunset in space was one of the main visual things that I was bringing forward,” Kasurinen confirmed. “The color palette of the game from the beginning was sunset colors. The reason I wanted to bring the screen in was that it is this fake screen that is given to the crew to keep them sane… The Tulpar doesn’t have any windows, so it was this depressive element that we wanted to bring in. They don’t see outside at all… During the writing, it became like an opportunity.”

The narrative designer and art director apparently had a lot figured out before starting to build the game, but she made it clear the small size of the team and simple nature of the project made it easy to stop and add to what was planned: “In the beginning, it was only ever gonna be the daytime scene and the sunset scene, but then I came up with the scene when you talk with Anya, notably the only one you talk in the nighttime screen… I think that then brought more and more into it. So then we had the axing of the screen and the warning sign. It became a big part of the narrative.” At this point Tomec added the first idea was to have that scene take place in an entirely different room where they’d “look into some sort of darkness,” maybe the cargo bay that’s used later into the game for a fun and tense stealth sequence.

The cargo being a ridiculous amount of mouthwash (played as a big joke at first) was also there from the beginning according to Kasurinen: “The idea came to me complete in a way that you always want ideas to come to you. It was always mouthwash, and I knew from the first pitch that I also wanted to call it Mouthwashing. The humorous element adds to the sadness of the situation… The implications of that hit a little bit later, so I think it’s a lot of fun in that sense… You wanna have the levity. When we made that scene where Swansea breaks sobriety and drinks, I asked our sound design guy, our composer (Martin Halldin), I wanted the music to actually be lighthearted.”

For Tomec, these tonal swings caused a “dissonance that’s really hard for players to grasp any time we talk about it kind of in retrospect.” In fact, to many people on the team, “the whole story seemed a lot funnier” as things got progressively worse and “comically terrible” in every situation. “When you don’t have the tone, the music, and all the art, and it’s just like a script sitting in front of you that’s just a list of increasingly terrible things that could happen to the characters, it really did feel like the whole game was supposed to be a sick joke, and that was the tone coming from How Fish Is Made, so I’m really surprised after seeing the game come out,” he said of the team’s POV and how the conversation around it has developed in a slightly different direction.

Of course, with the crushing weight of capitalism and big scary sci-fi corporations shaping much of the story and setting, I had to ask about bad workplace experiences that might have influenced the game. Moore and Tomec sat this one out, as they had “never had a job before.” Kasurinen, on the other hand, acknowledges past “workplace stress and workplace politics” as well as “stuff that rubs you the wrong way,” but she was actually thinking about Wrong Organ’s previous project more than anything else: “We tried to do another project between How Fish Is Made and Mouthwashing. It had to get cancelled and was during school. We weren’t a company yet. The project was taking too long and then people ended up having to go to internships and stuff because school was ending. It wasn’t dramatic in any sense, but I think for me, as someone who was in charge, it was really stressful… I think the catalyst that actually ended up creating Mouthwashing was this dying project that we were trying to breathe back to life… now it’s a spaceship and a dying crew and there’s this one person really trying to put it back together and you can’t.”

On the matter of Wrong Organ’s future and whether the scope of its next project would be kept tight, Moore said they “want to stick around” the 18-month cycle. Don’t expect something that’s in the same style of Mouthwashing though: “We want to establish very clearly that Wrong Organ isn’t a walking sim company only. We want to communicate that we have these core principles. We really like these weird, twisted narratives. We really like the PSX aesthetic, but how those things express themselves in the genres we decide to pursue is whatever we creatively feel inclined to go after.”

While they’re not quite ready to talk about what the game is yet, Tomec added they “really want to stretch” their legs and demonstrate they can do something else: “We can’t just make an 8-hour game that plays like Mouthwashing… We don’t want to stagnate as a company. That’s very important to us… We need to step into a different side of horror, explore the gameplay stuff, and make sure that we can do that and step towards a future where we can hopefully do both and make really cohesive narrative gameplay games.”

With 95% of the game’s Steam reviews marked as positive at the time of writing and fan art and fan fiction flourishing all over the Internet, it’s abundantly clear the game has become huge enough to have an extremely committed community, so I also had to ask the Wrong Organ crew about the most surprising part of the overall reaction to the game. “It’s gotta be the tattoos,” Moore says while Kasurinen celebrates. “It’s a big commitment to put something on your body, so to see people want to and actually do that with Mouthwashing has been the most surprising thing to me.” Tomec got a bit deeper into how the audiences’ “understanding” of the game shocked everyone at the studio: “When the game first came out, as we expected, lots of players missed out on some of the games’ deeper themes, but the culture around it has developed so much that now everyone knows about every little secret we put in the game.”

“I kind of like lost faith at some point because I just thought, you know, ‘it’s short, narrative and stuff, so it just won’t have that kind of appeal.’ So then when people actually started playing it, I was super surprised… It’s very strange, you have to give ownership of the project. It’s theirs now. They should discuss it how they like. I think it’s awesome,” Kasurinen concluded with a glowing smile on her face. In the age of too many creatives overexplaining their works and gradually taking every chunk of mystery out of them, that was a reassuring note to end on.