Mouthwashing’s follow-up is self-described ‘friendsweat’ where 3 players struggle to operate a tank in a defiled city: ‘We’re definitely not quite at Peak, but we’re not trying to make Arma either’

Ahead of Carcass Clad’s reveal at last month’s PC Gaming Show, I had the chance to speak to Wrong Organ devs Jeffrey Tomec and Dave van Egdom about the studio’s follow-up to its breakout hit, Mouthwashing. Carcass Clad is a very different sort of game, but with familiar themes and atmosphere. The bulk of our conversation, though, was about why the studio pivoted to co-op multiplayer, and how it feels to play.

It’s a pretty warmed-over bias these days to assume any studio swapping from single to multiplayer is “selling out” in some way, but Tomec and van Egdom told me they hadn’t even set out to make a co-op game initially⁠—Wrong Organ was just following the path of least resistance to the tank game it wanted to make.

“There was quite a bit of hesitation, but it also wasn’t even the original premise for the game,” Tomec said of the switch to co-op. “We had a cool idea for a tank game, and it was going to be a tank game where you control three people at once. Then we were like, ‘That seems like it could just be a co-op game.’ And now it’s a co-op game.”

“[The switch to co-op] happened very early in development,” said van Egdom. “I think we first started talking about ‘Tank Game,’ as we refer to it, [around] July 2024. We did the first ideation stuff, and then it was only like three months later that Jeff pitched making it a co-op thing instead.”

Tomec explained that, if the goal of Mouthwashing was to support its excellent script as much as possible through gameplay and visuals, the driving vision of Carcass Clad is to recreate the frantic, claustrophobic scenes from tank movies as emergent gameplay. Wrong Organ wants players to keep stumbling into scenes like the scripted one in Carcass Clad’s reveal trailer.

“Our players have probably made a bit of a mistake in the trailer by getting jumped by an enemy tank around a corner, but we expect players in reality tend to make those kinds of mistakes pretty often,” said Tomec. “It can be very stressful and very hard to see with how cramped the vehicle is, so things tend to find a way to sneak up on you.”

Specialization

Each player has a specific, narrow role in how they contribute to the tank’s success, with a team consisting of a driver, a gunner, and a commander. The first two are fairly self-explanatory, but both of those more hands-on play styles will be hampered by a lack of visibility and information, with the cramped, dark tank interior only providing narrow viewports to see outside.

Tomec told me that all three roles will be able to open a hatch and see outside the vehicle, but you don’t want to do that during a fight. Hell, it might be a bad idea to do that when you’re not actively fighting, lest somebody get the drop on you. “Up with miniskirts” indeed.

From our conversation and Carcass Clad’s screenshots, drivers will be almost blind when piloting the vehicle⁠—they can’t get a better view and move at the same time⁠—while it sounds like gunners will be limited to a super zoomed-in, scoped view unless they’re poking their heads out. I’m picturing something like an FPS sniper who can’t leave their aim-down-sights mode. That’s where the third role comes in.

The commander gets the most complete set of information, but no direct control of the tank’s function⁠—Tomec called it “the man in the chair fantasy”—and the core challenge of Carcass Clad seems to be the commander providing clear instruction and context to the other two, and them acting on it as effectively as possible.

“Being in a tank really just means you can’t see shit around you,” said van Egdom. “[Commanders] have access to a periscope, they can range find, they can do all of those things, make callouts, send drawings of the map and which route to take to their fellow crewmates, etc.”

Tomec said Wrong Organ’s goal is to “have everyone feel empowered in their own way, and really disempowered in their own way, where you feel like you’re relying on each other, but also don’t feel like it’s just your commander yelling at you to do stuff.”

Friendsweat

Tomec said that Wrong Organ took equal inspiration from military simulation games and the burgeoning “friendslop” genre of co-op multiplayer, but the final result diverges from both. Even though the co-op climbing game Peak, for instance, can have its moments of challenge and heartbreak, Carcass Clad sounds like it’s in a completely different ballpark.

“We almost call ourselves a friendsweat game, if we had had to put a genre label on it,” Tomec said. “We’re definitely not quite at Peak, but we’re not trying to make Arma either.” He wants Carcass Clad to have a lot of what milsim players appreciate about the genre⁠—attention to detail, tactility, plus a high level of challenge and consequence⁠—but in a more fantastical setting divorced from high playercount PvP.

“My analogous example would be Helldivers,” said Tomec. “The way that Helldivers explores a ton of military simulator mechanics in a framework that’s very far from a milsim, and we’d like to be almost a tank equivalent of that.”

I was very curious about those titular carcass clad tanks, and Tomec told me that this was largely something only enemy vehicles would be taking advantage of, mostly as a sort of improvised armor we’ll have to chew through before damaging the tank itself. Having only enemy tanks be carcass clad was partially a practical concern with the game’s perspective⁠—we won’t be seeing the outside of the tank very much⁠—but we’ll still have some ways of getting weird with it.

“You might find yourself with some weird shit inside the tank, and some of that weird, carcassy horror entering your vehicle,” said Tomec. “But from a gameplay layer, armoring yourself is not much of a focus, it’s most of the enemies doing it.”

Mouthwashing was a game that left me so stressed and depressed, I had to go lie down for awhile afterward⁠—I had a similar experience reading the transcript of a recent PlayStation investor meeting. It sounds like Carcass Clad will evoke similar feelings in an actionized, co-op, run-based format. But there will be some quiet time too. Maybe.

“You will have some breaks. A run isn’t just sitting there for two hours, constantly moving,” said van Egdom. “There’s a kind of Left 4 Dead run structure, where you’ll have safe rooms in between, and in safe rooms you’re very likely to be able to leave the tank.

“I say ‘likely’, because this is just where we’re at in development. We could change fucking everything, man. We’re going to do what we have to to make the tank cool. That’s the baseline.”