Mouth Sweet

If I were to compare Mouth Sweet to something, I'd probably compare it to the works of David Lynch. Okay, in all honestly, I've never actually seen any of his works, I've just heard about them and played a bunch of games inspired by them. So let's say I would compare this to the works of the fans of the works of David Lynch. The entire game is weird, trippy, and wonderfully bullocks in every way, shape and form and honestly, it's amazing.

The visuals, for one, are immediately striking. The gameboy aesthetic is one I'm very fond of, and the pixel art in this game sure as hell looks sweet. Mouth sweet. The mapping is pretty cool, and there's a lot of variety in the areas you'll be visiting, especially later on into the game. The soundtrack is pretty funky too! There's some really cool ambience sounds in the end game, as well as some pretty spooky sound effects. I also really liked how the background for the shooting sections changed depending on where you were, though it would be common sense for them to do that anyway, but still a cool detail. The aesthetics honestly accompanied the rest of the game very well, with even the scene transitions being kinda abstract/weird.



The story is mainly surreal and non-sensical, but handled very very well. I never found myself frustrated by the randomness. In fact, as I've mentioned before, I ended up loving it. It's not some super amazing story filled with shocking reveals, but I feel that unlike most David Lynchian games I've played, it had enough to satisfy and didn't leave you wishing there was an 'actual' story, so to say. That being said, there is an 'actual' story, so probably a poor wording choice there, but hopefully you understand what I mean.



The gameplay is where the game tries to be unique, by introducing the gimmick of shooting invisible enemies. This is handled pretty well throughout the game, with footsteps being panned and their volume changing to give away the enemy locations. I also liked how they had an easy mode if you had hearing problems or just wanted to skip the battles. I did play on easy mode at first and I'm pretty sure I explored just about everything, and then I had a second (shorter) playthrough in normal mode.

It's actually somewhat non linear too. You can actually keep playing and doing the tasks normally, which lets you see a few areas that you could have skipped over by taking the shorter route, which is just... leaving, actually. After you find the car keys, you can just leave the building at any point and end up at the final dungeon. This was really cool, I liked how it made most of the game optional, but I do highly recommend taking the longer route because there's actually quite a few cool things to see.

It IS a game that is set up like it would have lots of secrets and multiple endings, but it doesn't exactly live up to it too much. As far as I could tell, there is only one ending, and not really a ton of secrets to discover. I kind of do wish more was done here, or maybe there are actually secrets to discover but I'm just horrible at finding them. Whoops.



It's a pretty well polished game, though. It played out very smoothly. I did come across a game breaking bug where I tried going back up the stairs somewhere near the start and ended up getting softlocked on a black screen, but other than that, I didn't really find anything glitchy.

All in all, I think Mouth Sweet is a great surreal little experience with amazing pixel art to spend an hour on. It's gotten me interested in the developer's other projects for sure. I give it four and a half enemies out of five!