THANK YOU, you hit exactly on my problem with the game: it's such a jankily-built game for something the devs seemingly are hinging their company's future on and spent two years building.
The actual GAME part of the game feels like it's about to break at every moment. Clicking on interactable objects is a chore. The inventory system is so obtuse you keep encountering minigames that clearly were intended to play differently but you have to do an awkward two-items-at-a-time dance because of inventory size.
I support the development of transgressive art projects, but for all the marketing around HORSES this ends up being a story that REALLY hopes you haven't watched much giallo from the 70s, 'cus this is just a bunch of giallo trends stapled together. What's worse: the plot doesn't really commit to saying much about the horses themselves beyond vague inferences. In a way, it's authentic giallo in that its plot is kneecapped by what feels like cut content or a writer forgetting to close a loop.
It could be an excellent novel, animated video, or straight up live action short film. But instead it's a video game. A video game that does not really demonstrate any evidence that my choices matter. I have no impulse to replay sections and make different choices because there's nothing (either in-universe or meta-textually in the game's menus) indicating the choices impact anything other than dialog.
GavinGaddis
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To be explicitly clear: I do not think he acted with any malice or attempt to get press. I think it's a situation where other people at Wrong Organ tried a little marketing tactic that broke TOS, got their wrist slapped, and decided it wasn't worth informing their music guy of something kind of embarrassing. Especially given it happened when Mouthwashing was very much a critical darling and making plenty of sales on Steam.
Would you messaged every individual person you worked with on an indie game (that's doing great sales-wise) to inform them you broke the TOS and got the game de-listed on itch, or would you just let it slide? It's completely unrelated to what they did on the game, and it's one less person who has to know you got in the tiniest bit of trouble.
This looks to be more of a situation where journalists, who are used to small game devs where one person has TONS of roles in the company, did not slow down long enough to message other people at Wrong Organ to confirm the music guy has all the relevant details and not just... an employee who has literally not looked at Wrong Organ's itch account until yesterday. They also didn't take five seconds to plug Mouthwashing's itch link into the Wayback machine and see it's been delisted all of 2025, which immediately pokes holes in the original guy's announcement.
We're at a point where reporters HAVE to be the first to report on something if they wanna justify their income, but that comes with the downside of not having time to wait for replies to emails or doing basic due diligence legwork.
To GameSpot's credit, they immediately edited their version of the story with an update and new headline as soon as they found out.
To follow this up a little more: it appears the core source of all this panic about Mouthwashing specifically is because the composer of the game. He seems to have not been informed Mouthwashing got delisted back in October. Something itch did because because Wrong Organ was using their itch page purely to funnel people to Steam to buy the game, not buy it on itch.
So when the composer idly looked up Mouthwashing this morning he found it delisted and made a (to him) logical presumption.
Writers, looking to be the first to scoop this story and get all the SEO goodies, ran stories without talking to anyone else at the developer or itch and now it's gonna take days to claw back all the misinfo that's been spread about it.