John only has one feeling, the feeling of being awesome, and is obviously too busy to respond. John thinks Sam’s a softie for always caring about stupid feelings. Sam calls John on the phone after his holiday because, while all his pictures look fun, Sam wants to be sure there’s nothing wrong. Throughout all of these attempts to find love, Sam is beside John and trying to offer emotional support. So, John figures, exercising like Sam might get him the date he desires. He starts working out extensively! He gets competitive with his mate Sam, who already has a wife and kids. How is that fair? He has the job and he has the possessions and he has the experiences, why won’t these women fall madly in love with him yet? John is still a dick. None of these encounters make John feel happy, or less alone. Using his travel photos on a Tinder equivalent app he has a sexual encounter with a a filthy unhygienic woman, a single mum who uses him as a babysitter, and gets invited to a wedding so his date can make the groom jealous. In search of answers, John decides to go travelling, hoping that a wealth of new experiences will make him interesting enough to earn companionship. He subsequently destroys his possessions, furious that they didn’t get him the love, support, and sex he felt he had earned. John buys fancy things, invites in the pizza delivery woman, tries to get her drunk, she gets uncomfortable and flees. And he goes on to repeat this cycle multiple times in different variations over the three months before the reunion, each time with similar results. John is a dick and an arse, both literally and figuratively.

He had the promotion, he was nice to her, why didn’t he get what he wanted? John feels led on, in spite of having had otherwise a lovely night. Now, John doesn’t understand why all his accumulated friendship points didn’t win him sex. His coworker Barbara does not invite him in for sex after the date, a desire he has repeatedly mentioned during the drunken evening. He gets her drunk, showboats sloppily behind the bar, then insists on walking her home. John asks his coworker on a date, which in his mind he has earned. His male best friend Sam asks if he’s okay, which he isn’t, but John doesn’t want to be seen as a softie, so he doesn’t talk about the physical pain he’s enduring. Our ‘hero’ manages to get a promotion at work by testing a particularly nasty and dangerously powerful vibrator, injuring himself in the process. Immediately you might expect the game to make hay about his occupation, and its lack of heterosexual male appeal, but within this world it feels pretty normalised. John rushes off to work, running late to his bland and boring office job at the dildo testing factory. (Fun side note: in Genital Jousting there are both male and female penises, a step forward for trans presentation in games if ever I saw one.) To top it all off, John wants to turn his life around before the reunion so people will see him differently to how they did in school. He lives alone, struggles to keep on top of his own hygiene, eats nothing but takeaway meals, has a filthy home, and a study that’s basically a gaming-stroke-porn room. He has nightmares of being harassed by big scary punk kids, and his dreams always end with him being reminded that nobody will ever love him.įrom the first moments, it’s clear that John is living with depression. John (presumably his surname is Thomas) is a middle-aged penis who, three months out from his school reunion, is anxious about how he will be received by his classmates. That perception of the game somewhat shifted when the game released on Steam, thanks to the presence of a remarkably timely and serious story mode about a guy called John who… well, there’s no other way to put it. It never seemed like an especially serious game more a lighthearted laugh where players can giggle at the naughty stuff going on. Players struggle to control disembodied cartoon penises with anuses at the ‘bottom’ of their testicles, which wriggle around trying to penetrate each other. Most people know Genital Jousting as a slightly silly multiplayer party game which has been doing the rounds at gaming conventions and on Steam Early Access over the past few years.

The following article contains spoilers for Genital Jousting’s story mode. This article was originally published January 2018.

Genital jousting multiplayer co op