It’s no secret that Steam Greenlight, for all its benefits, has opened a sewer floodgate onto Steam. As awesome as the service is for indie developers, for every Clicker Heroes or Five Nights at Freddy’s, there are a dozen half-baked, hack jobs.
But without further ado, from the brilliant minds at One Game Studio (or at least we hope they are), comes What’s Under Your Blanket!?. You play as a young hand-shandy enthusiast trying to get your rocks off amidst pets, friends and elderly citizens invading your personal space, along with relatives with an unhealthy obsession with your sleeping habits.
The game has five main levels – your bedroom, your computer, the gym, a hospital ward and (most bafflingly) your living room on Christmas’ Eve, where you are treated to Santa Claus himself trying to catch you jingling your bells. In between each level you can also find yourself treated to an arm-wrestling contest mini-game, which as we all know is the natural pastime for spanking enthusiasts. One might assume that this feature is placed in to pad the pitiful, overall run-time; but perhaps I’m being cynical, after all my faith in humanity has been somewhat diminished by having to play Jerk-It Simulator 2016.
The key mechanic of the game is clicking, you have to click your mouse as fast as you can in order to fill a meter at the base of the screen, which will decrease on its own during the arm-wrestling segments, but not the masturbation segments. The amount of clicks you have to make within the time limit will increase, to the point where I physically broke a sweat in the final levels. To be honest I really can’t suggest what mechanic could have been better suited for the key gameplay, but I do know that there are far more entertaining ways to destroy the brand new gaming mouse my sister bought me for Christmas.
There are a couple of points I’d like to briefly berate. First, if your masturbation combo counter (yes, you read that right) climbs too high then one of two things will happen: One, you will break the bedframe and the police will burst into the room, I assume because the larger narrative of the game involves a utopian society where no crime exists save for the obnoxious squeaking of bedsprings; Two, your penis will spontaneously combust, and firefighters will burst into the room and run around without actually helping to fight the fire. I assume the latter is because of friction, but again I personally would notice this danger before the fact. Interestingly this made me consider that perhaps our protagonist suffers from some kind of dead penile nerves, which would at least explain why it’s such a struggle to fill the bloody masturbation meter in the time limit.
Naturally, should you get caught/run out of time/explode your genitals the game ends and you have to start from level one and work your way back up, I assume because if you could just choose your starting level you could power through the game with in no time, with breaks to rest your carpal-tunnel riddled hands. You will also have to employ the WASD in order to close the door, or chase cats and burly men from the room, which seems to in no way impede the amassed progress toward your grand finale beyond the time taken to chase them; but hey, let’s not kink-shame.
Additionally, trying to guess which objects you can or can’t clip through is a whole game unto itself, the hospital level alone has four beds you can move through and one you are almost guaranteed to get trapped on every time you get up, I would use this to accuse the developers of cutting corners or trying to shoehorn in some extra difficulty for playtime, but at this point that’s par for the course in this game. I feel that I can’t blame the developers for padding though, once you do finish the game there is absolutely no replay value, the joke ended within 10 seconds of being on the store-page and only the criminally insane would think of bothering to grab the achievement for knocking over the Christmas tree in the final level.
As for the visuals of the game, I really don’t know what to say. “Simplistic” comes to mind but then I’m not sure how I would feel about watching an ultra-realistic, motion capture representation of the act, somehow I doubt it would have raised the overall tone of the game. My other major gripe is that the player character seems to literally ejaculate fireworks, again a more realistic point of view might be a little extreme but even so I can’t help but cringe at the mechanics of lighting a fuse within one’s own urethra.
To be honest if this game has taught me anything, it’s to be glad that Steam now lets you permanently delete games from your history. But you know what? For less than a dollar it’s not that bad, and if you do have a dollar and some time to kill then sure, go ahead, consider this my recommendation for What’s Under Your Blanket!?, as long as you admit that you really have nothing better to do with your time. After all, I have no other ideas about what else one could do alone at a computer for twenty minutes.
