The 'simulator' genre has become one of the go-to areas for indie developers trying to create a comedy experience. Whether causing chaos in the kitchen with Walking Simulator, these titles have generally been more about concept than content. It now seems as though the genre has reached its natural conclusion with Wanking Simulator.
Wanking Simulator casts the player as Winston Gay, a man looking to cause destruction in his home town of Gay Bay after being exiled over his lewd habits. The game's core story mode takes place across a series of simplistic open environments, where the player is given a checklist of activities that effectively boil down to acts of violence and masturbation. There is also a sandbox mode, challenges, and a parkour mode, but the gameplay and goals essentially remain the same.
It may seem outlandish, but this kind of irreverence has been seen many times before in video games. The most obvious example of this is Postal 2, which acts very much as a template for Wanking Simulator from its flippant tone through to its unsympathetic protagonist. Recently other games have taken up the mantle of notoriety too, such as the adults only adventure gameplay of House Party.
There's a history to live up to, but Wanking Simulator doesn't do anything new. With limited jokes, attempts at offensiveness (typos included), and unremarkable gameplay, the game fails to break out from what's come before. It also fails to do anything extreme enough to warrant talking about, with stale humor that would have been é twenty years ago.
Wanking Simulator does turn to shock factor occasionally, with one example being a tasteless DLC pack called Wankhan that tries capitalize on the COVID-19 pandemic; at least the content of Wanking Simulator ensures that the player character will be washing their hands regularly. Other than that, the majority of the attempts at comedy come from having masculine NPCs in dresses, suicide bombing terrorists, and simulated masturbation.
It's all very tame and has been seen before. Even those players who turn to the game for gross-out humor will be disappointed, as Wanking Simulator doesn't offer anything at all in that respect. After all, when games like the Saints Row series already provide provocation alongside fun gameplay, it's hard to see who would get a kick out of Walking Simulator.
On top of that the gameplay and setup are very dull. Every other level returns the player to the tiny town of Gay Bay, and tasks them with more arbitrary quests to complete before moving on. These consist of the odd bit of violence and - of course - wanking, but because of the simplicity and clunky mechanics even something as ridiculous as throwing cum bombs from a hot air balloon to disrupt an election is tedious.
Occasionally Wanking Simulator does try to reach the humor that standout titles like Goat Simulator have achieved, relying heavily on ragdoll physics and absurd locations like secret government facilities or even alien planets to make an impression. However, it's all undone by boring gameplay and reused character models, leaving every level playing in exactly the same way.
Wanking Simulator is definitely one to avoid. A game like this needs to either push boundaries or act as a mirror of an existing game, but it does neither. Instead, it's a boring and disappointingly tame short sandbox experience that fails to live up to the impudence of its name.
Wanking Simulator is available on Steam for PC. Screen Rant was provided with a PC code for the purposes of this review.
