HOUSE PARTY REVIEW

story by Mike Gas

published on September 15, 2022

The worst part about House Party is the sex. Here’s my argument, if you’re going to make a porn game, sell it for $30, and essentially make ME have to pay money to hear the Game Grumps chit chat over the entire story (this actually happened to me because I refused to engage them once they showed up, so they just kept running around the house endlessly talking), the sex should at least be fun. House Party’s sex is boring, lifeless, and loses all its novelty after one scene.

There is an extremely uncanny disconnect between the sex and the game’s narrative. The story almost makes it, it almost has a cast of compelling characters, but the game feels like it’s too afraid to hold onto any sense of earnestness, and because of that, the idea alone of fucking these characters is just so god damn awkward.

Every time I would start to feel some semblance of empathy for a character, when I started to see the men and women of House Party as more than just the fuckbags the developers intended them to be, they’d open their mouth and say some weird meme shit that would fly completely over my head because I wasn't on Twitter that week. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking it’s a little offputting to be having hyper-realistic virtual sex with characters who have less personality in them than an Instagram meme account admin.

Even the developers seemed stumped at that question of how to fit the porn part of this game into their porn game, so much so that it went through two iterations before release. The original legacy mode is now an optional setting in the game, in this mode you wiggle your mouse up and down until either you or your partner climaxes. Yea, doesn't sound very exciting does it? On it's official release, they changed the sex to be non-playable cutscenes only. So now instead of actively participating in incredibly boring simulated sex, you just get to watch it instead.

Both modes have nothing to them besides just being a poor attempt to get the players rocks off. That isn’t necessarily bad. But if you got a game with hefty production values, bordering on a AA experience like House Party, I say shoot for the moon, have something to say with your sex, set yourself apart from the other heaps of porn games flooding the gates of Steam instead of putting that energy and money into boring shit like Game Grumps and Doja Cat cameos.

Sex in games can be fun, and more importantly, it can also be cool. Bear with me here, I’d like to spotlight a series of games made by one man, not a team, one guy. Just one gay man figured out how to make sex cool in games and his name is Robert Yang.