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 endings