This is first of ten essays contained within the second issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. We will be posting a new essay every Friday from now until September, but if you would like to read all the essays early and support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by @pillowkisser!
by Davis G. See
The Dark Ages Of Western Gay Visual Novels
When I backed Coming Out on Top on Kickstarter at the tail end of 2012, I had only played one other gay adult visual novel. That game was Enzai, which, in 2006, was the first gay adult VN to receive an official English release, with only a very small number of others having even had English fan translations. I had no idea what I was getting into with Enzai, only that it was a video game featuring men having sex with each other. When I played it, I discovered that it was actually about a skinny young man being imprisoned and repeatedly, violently raped. This was not what I wanted.
In the time between the release of Enzai in 2006 and Coming Out on Top’s release in 2014, a handful of other gay adult VNs saw official or unofficial English releases. Some were fangames for properties like Death Note or Hetalia; some were small, amateur projects with low production values; and at least one was about old, heavyset men. But most were similar to Enzai, i.e. games about yaoi twinks being sexually assaulted. I’m sure some people felt well catered to during this time, but for those of us who could not understand Japanese1 or get off to depictions of rape, the pickings were slim.
I explain all this to stress that Obscura, the developer of Coming Out on Top, was doing something unique. At least as far as the English-speaking world was concerned, there was nothing else like Coming Out on Top.
A Gay College Fantasy Comedy
In Coming Out on Top, you play as Mark Matthews, a college senior about to begin his last semester. At the story’s outset, he finally comes out to his roommates and the world at large, freeing him to have a final semester as full of sexual and romantic encounters with men as the player wishes. With 6 main routes and 10 casual hook-ups via an in-game Grindr parody, “Brofinder,” there is plenty of action to be had.
A look at the pre-Kickstarter demo version of Coming Out on Top.
That is all true of the final version of the game, which received its last update in 2017. The very first demo version, made months before the launch of the Kickstarter, had only one romantic interest and no sexual content. Obscura developed that version after finding nothing with the kind of content she wanted to see and the kinds of guys she was attracted to2. While she expected her game to be liked by “a small audience among women who enjoy yaoi or slash fiction,” the most fervent positive reactions were from queer men. They, too, had been looking for something like this.
Some of these comments are from before Coming Out on Top came out, while others are more recent, but they’re all from queer men who connected with the game.
At a glance, the most obvious difference between Coming Out on Top and the games that came before it is the men. While it isn’t particularly diverse, featuring beefy jocks more than any other physique, even that made it an oasis in a desert of yaoi twinks. However, the real difference is in its tone and subject matter. Coming Out on Top is first and foremost a romantic comedy, emphasis on comedy. Obscura not only writes funny lines, but also knows when to let the player be the straight man (so to speak) and when to allow them to let loose and choose a quippy one-liner or instigate some wacky antics. One of my favourite scenes sees Mark attending a fancy fundraiser while wearing a ridiculous top hat and high on animal tranquilizers. Romance routes do feature conflict and drama, but never to a degree that would bring down the game’s overall mood. Many storylines touched on serious topics during development that were removed before the final release.
It certainly makes an impression!
A key example is Mark’s coming out. In About Coming Out on Top3, the game’s development diary, Obscura discusses a cut image of Penny embracing Mark: “Originally I had Mark come out to his parents. After not receiving an immediate reply from them, he becomes sad and anxious. Here, Penny reassures him”4. In the final game, Mark comes out to his parents on a call, and they are quick to make things awkward by asking if he’s a top or a bottom. Similarly, the scholastically challenged Brad, one of the romantic interests, was originally meant to drop out of school, on top of dealing with religious parents. According to Obscura, “the whole plot was much too heavy for a game like this, so this was nixed in favor of just concentrating on Brad’s avoidance of schoolwork”5. His route in the final game is refreshingly light, with his greatest struggle arising when he is caught making out with Mark, his tutor, instead of working on a paper.
Coming Out Under Scrutiny
Coming Out on Top was received warmly, and remains popular, but it wasn’t immune to criticism. Indeed, being so unique made it a target of intense scrutiny. Of course, any time a woman writes fiction primarily about queer men, she is going to be subject to skepticism. Men will hunt for evidence of her failure, determined to prove that women cannot write gay men with anything resembling legitimacy. Obscura got comments insinuating that she “ha[d] no right” and was “obviously fetishizing gay men”9. I believe these concerns were heightened by the fact that Coming Out on Top was so alone in its genre. If there were a lot of games like it made by queer men, it wouldn’t have been a big deal for this one to be made by a woman. Nonetheless, the fact that it is so beloved by gay men proves that it did not miss the mark, or at least not by far enough to matter. We also know that Obscura put the work in. She ran a lot past the people—mostly men—in her Kickstarter backers’ forum, discussing “things like circumcision, pubes, body types, and safe sex” and ensuring that Coming Out on Top felt accurate to their experiences.
The diversity, or lack thereof, of the game’s cast was also questioned, in terms of both race and body type. While fielding criticism of the body types present in the game, Obscura stated that she “was far more concerned with representing non-white dudes. Body types, not so much”. The non-white dudes in question make up two out of six of the game’s eligible bachelors: Phil, a Black military cadet, and Jed, an Asian punk band frontman, with a few more non-white options showing up in the Brofinder dates. She also expressed a desire to explore the challenges that men of colour face generally and in the gay community11. I have a feeling that some of what she intended was cut, similar to other serious real-world topics, but the game still does not pretend race does not exist. Mark makes an embarrassing “I’m not racist, but” comment in the presence of Phil, comically hampering the other man’s first impression of him. Jed, meanwhile, is subject to racist heckling from a belligerent audience member, which Jed shuts down confidently. Neither of these moments are central to these men’s stories, instead being leveraged for Obscura’s main goal: making the reader laugh.
Jed’s great. We like Jed.
Could these moments have “just not been a thing,” as one reviewer pressed? Sure. After all, the game isn’t particularly concerned with realism, as one famous fish-fucking scene makes clear. But it’s the touch of realism, the grounding of the story in a real-world setting, that makes the absurd moments work. Similarly, even though issues around coming out are not the focus of the game, their presence adds authenticity. When Brad has to dispel his frat brother’s belief that he is straight, I know that the conversation is not going to go poorly. Nonetheless, I feel for Brad, having also been in situations where I’ve had to explain myself to clueless heterosexuals. Obscura buys my trust with these moments, allowing her to test my suspension of disbelief in others.
The one criticism that Coming Out on Top has never been able to dodge is the already-alluded-to issue of body types. This was more the case at launch than it is now, with the late additions of the handsome bear Amos as the game’s sixth route and a touch more variety in the Brofinder dates, but at a glance, five out of six of the game’s romanceable men, along with the protagonist, are hunks of about the same shape. How much of an issue you find this to be may depend on your own queer media background. For fans of gay games, there was nothing else with guys who looked like this, but that’s kind of shocking when, at least here in the West, these kinds of hunks are everywhere, from the gay porn Obscura drew from to popular gay media like Queer as Folk.
The Dawn of a New Age
So was Coming Out on Top a breath of fresh air in the gay games space, or a rehash of tired tropes? Well... both, right? Part of the issue was that Coming Out on Top was breaking new ground, and so it had to be everything for everybody, an impossible task. With the benefit of hindsight, we can recognize it simply as a gay game with a focus on beefy jocks. In the years since the release of Coming Out on Top, there has been an explosion of gay adult visual novels. I see 2023’s All Men Are Pigs as a successor of sorts to Coming Out on Top, being another Kickstarter success story with an irreverent sense of humour and even more unabashed queerness at its centre thanks to being set in and around a gay bar. It also has a more diverse cast right from the outset. Add to that the entire output of Y Press Games, a larger selection of translated Japanese games like Slow Damage or Hashihime of the Old Book Town, smaller scale but still polished projects like Tomai or Yarrow Valley, and so, so many furry games, and you’re sure to find something that piques your interest. Ten years on, Coming Out on Top no longer has to be everything to everyone. It is finally free to be itself.
Davis G. See is a gay writer and game developer out of Alberta, Canada. He has an assortment of published works, including short stories, poems, and essays. He is currently working on his own gay visual novel in DESERT OF ASH: a Post-Apocalyptic Gay Sex Simulator. Learn more about it and his other games at https://davisgsee.itch.io.
1It’s difficult to find an accurate list of all gay adult games released in Japanese, but if VNDB is anything to go by, even if you could understand Japanese, your options weren’t that great.
2In the above article, Obscura admits that she was also into gay porn at the time, which may explain how her tastes would come to draw in a mostly gay audience.
3This digital book was only available as a Kickstarter reward.
4About Coming Out On Top, page 46.
5About Coming Out On Top, page 92.
The second issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology is now officially available to the public! Ten terrific essays about adult games and adult game culture! Over 70 pages and almost 25,000 words long! Can you really afford to NOT get this anthology and support more high-quality writing about adult games?