Genital Jousting's story mode is like The Stanley Parable but you're a penis

You know what Genital Jousting is, yeah? It's the multiplayer game where everyone looks like a wobbling penis graffiti drawn by a 10-year-old boy. Those penises also have buttholes, and these weird dickbutt things chase each other around a variety of different multiplayer modes. It's a surprisingly fun beers-on-the-couch party game that went from Early Access to full release this year.

And with the full release, it gained a single-player story mode. Which was not something people were crying out for. If there was suddenly a single-player story mode in Vermintide, I'd be excited. Overwatch, yeah, why not. The game about cartoon wangs, though?

What's even stranger is that it's good.

You are John, an ordinary penis who works in an office and worries about his approaching high school reunion. You play through his stress dreams and work life and the dates he goes on, all using the deliberately clumsy controls of Genital Jousting. You might be late for work and trying to get to your desk unnoticed or ask out Barbara in the middle of a meeting, and at some point your testicles are going to get in the way, the physics will go haywire and a fire extinguisher and a cactus will probably fall on someone.

One of the first things you do in the tutorial is eat an apple with your butt

These events are narrated by a toffee-voiced lady in the most arch way imaginable, and if the chaos of struggling to get through normal situations while being a penis is like a NSFW reinterpretation of Octodad, the narrative elements are more like The Stanley Parable with dick jokes. Sometimes all you're doing is walking down a hallway—well, wriggling down a hallway, leaving a trail of damp residue that's the most disgusting thing in a pretty gross game—while being told about John's existential struggles.

When John does experience temporary triumph it's punctuated by an underwhelming burst of confetti spurting out of him.

All this takes place in a world where everyone's a wang, men and women both, and where those wangs have butts that are also apparently their mouths. One of the first things you do in the tutorial is eat an apple with your butt, and after that you have to brush your teeth by jamming a toothbrush up there. I don't know if anyone's thought through the fine details of this schlong-based alternate reality and how it came to be this way; "does Genital Jousting have lore" is not something I thought I'd find myself Googling today.

Anyway, the whole thing can be wrapped up in under two hours and you will probably laugh more than once in that time. I wouldn't rush to buy Genital Jousting just for this, and even the online stuff is only worth it at peak times when the servers are full, but while the real attraction of Genital Jousting is obviously playing with your friends it's nice that there's a way to experience being a penis on your own.

(There's a bit at the end where you simultaneously control your best friend Sam, who is green, well-adjusted, and uncircumcised, and you might need a friend for that, but I managed to get through it steering both of them at once.)

Genital Jousting is available now on Steam. If you want to know what its creators were thinking, there's a surprisingly thoughtful FAQ just for that.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.