Genital Jousting's final cut thrusts into the limelight with story mode
A penis and a potato board a boat. A dick-tater-ship is formed.
Everyone loves a good dick joke, but Broforce studio Free Lives' Genital Jousting is something else. It's bizarrely visceral and meaty in a way that comedy schlongs rarely are. It feels a world away from the twirling phalluses of Mount Your Friends, with meat slapping against meat with uncanny gusto, accompanied by some quite unsettling Foley work.
Free Lives realize this, to some degree, and have attempted to put fears to rest and defuse some difficult questions with an extensive Q&A. It's a complex, thorny thing and one I'm not especially willing to deep-dive into. What's less complex is that the game has left early access and properly launched, including a solo story mode, as unusual as that sounds.
Originally flopping on to early access as a purely multiplayer game, the long and short (although not very hard) of Genital Jousting has always been it's anarchic, competitive online challenge mode. The meat and potatoes of gameplay involves slinging your digital Johnson around the screen, attempting to thrust the tip of your wang into the testicular anuses of other players. It's easy to see how the game could be read as problematic (and due to its high tallywhacker quotient is already banned from Twitch), but the sheer absurdity of disembodied, anatomically baffling cocks hurling themselves at each other renders the experience more surreal than disturbing.
That said, the story mode seems to be an especially unusual addition to the package. You play as John, a penis in a world of penises. John must complete his morning routine; eat, drink, go to the toilet, get to work, complete chores and eventually find love, all through the time-honored means of hurling physics-driven objects around a computer screen until things fall into place long enough to look like an adequate solution. Plus, more thrusting of Tab A into Slot B. While more structured than the likes of Goat Simulator, it does seem to fall into the broad genre definition of 'fumblecore'.
Genital Jousting is available via Steam and Humble for around £5/$7, although it seems to be somewhat cheaper via Humble at present. It is of absolutely no surprise to man nor beast that the game is published by Devolver Digital.