Disclaimer: Coming Out on Top is a NSFW game, so the review will include references to the actions inside the game that are also NSFW. If that makes you uncomfortable then this isn’t the review for you.
You continue pushing into him, his colon snuggling your dick..
Coming Out on Top is the perfect dating sim if you’re looking for more penis in your life.
When I found out that Coming Out on Top was written by a woman, I was not surprised. It comes from the same world as thousands of pieces of slash fanfiction, a genre commonly written for and by women. Coming Out on Top is the Harry Potter/Supernatural College AU slash fanfiction that you wrote when you were in college and were feeling a bit racy.
The world is populated by myriad of attractive men, all muscular and either bearded or not to your specifications. They also all happen to be both gay and sexually interested in you (with some persuading). They’re all sexually compatible too, no getting into bed and finding out that your partner is a top when you are a top. You have no refractory period, everyone is clean and STD free (whether you toggle condoms on or off). Simultaneous orgasms. No matter who you screw, the beautiful neighbor upstairs with the tats or the floppy haired best friend, everything will ultimately show up under a sexually rose-colored glass.
The only thing that Coming Out on Top truly fails at in this regard is a diversity of options. There are no bears, even though the game offers you chest hair and beards they’re light, bare dusters of hair. In that sense, it’s almost clinical — There’s a progression of naked, underwear models with slight variations on personality but basically identical body types. They all have inexplicable six packs, the kind of physical definition that is impossible without a daily gym workout they all somehow manage to sneak in. This game has the sexual diversity of two Ken dolls being smashed together (if the Ken dolls came with porn-star penises).
For more on the subject of how Coming Out on Top generalizes the queer form, you can read Todd Harper’s fantastic Paste article on the subject.
The game is fun, don’t get me wrong. There is humorous dialogue and connections to be made at Orlin University, but it departs from real human interaction in favor of bored stereotypes and perfect, beautiful specimens of gay manhood. There is definitely a market for that — rigid muscles and “turgid” penises abound, and if you want to collect images of sexually attractive men then this is the game for you.
She’s moaning about holes being filled or somesuch. You think maybe she should pursue a career in road maintenance.
The writing in the game often falls on the tired cliches of pornographic writing. Men “shoot out ropes of semen,” and men’s cocks strain against their zippers. It’s not the most original script in the world, mostly because it relies not just on the accepted language of pornography but also on the stereotypes of characters. There’s the empty headed jock, the morale-teacher-you’d-like-to-bang, and the dopey best friend. It doesn’t challenge any of your conceptions about the medium, except that all of the characters that you can romance are dudes and you are also. If anything this allows the writers to capitalize on some of the tropes of gay media as well — the closeted jock or the homophobic military man who’s hiding the fact that he’s closeted.
Ultimately, Coming Out on Top is a fun bit of media that is perfect if you’re looking for a bit more interactive gay porn in your life. Outside of that, it is little more than the dating sim equivalent of cotton candy.
