OnlyCans Musings 🔞

OnlyCans links: itch.io page | Steam page

Played OnlyCans while streaming to the friend who told me about it recently. It's a joke game about jerking off cans with lore about fictional satire soda company Shize. I came away (ironically?) dissatisfied by the entire experience.

To play, you choose a can to jerk off, and jerk it off via one of those "meter with bouncing indicator that must be interacted with when it's in the right spot" mechanics. You interact by clicking left-click ("snap") or right-click ("spray"). The cans are voice acted so they moan and groan in response to how well you do. A timer runs down during the whole thing. The only way to finish the jerk-off minigame once you start it is to wait for the timer to run out.

It takes about an hour to play through every can level, and may take you up to two depending on whatever factors.

Most audaciously of all:

The game feels so fucking bad.

(Disclaimer: this whole post probably comes from being a rhythm gamer in particular.)

On the "why"s of this opinion:

Feedback feels sort of dogshit. The "good" spot feels fucking ginormous - oftentimes I felt like my indicator was half the bar away and it was still rewarding me. This may have just been because it really is that generous, due to being a joke sex game, but it's somewhat unrewarding and nonsensical feeling. Mostly because...

For the most part, all mistakes I made were because I mixed up left and right click. I think that's because the only indication you have of which to do is an image on the screen. Whenever they switch, you just have to see that they switched. This sounds like a nothing complaint, but since humans have delay reacting to visuals vs. audio, it's kind of crazy annoying when also paired with...

The game fucking flashbangs you every time you snap the can. Literally just a sudden, full-screen bright white flash. Why.

More broadly, the "hit" sounds are the same every time when you spray or snap. I assume it's to prevent overshadowing the voice actors' hard work, but that's honestly kind of sad to me when the can voiceacting is both all over the place and much slower to determine success or failure from. I need to hear a lot more of someone moaning or grumbling at me to solve if they're into it than a quick snap or spritz sound effect. Could just be a me problem, though.

My biggest gripe with the game might be that there's no quick restart. Forcing the player to sit out the timer doesn't make sense to me. This simulated can sex is not actual sex. I am playing a game. I am trying to S-Rank your stupid game as fast as possible to move on with my life. Let me quit out your minigame mid-timer run down if I mess up a beat and lock myself out of S-Rank. Come on.

I'm not some indie sex game authority or whatever, so maybe all of this griping is meaningless and just a "me" problem. I don't know. I'm just taking away from the whole experience that I am more irritable than I remembered.

And ultimately: this is still a really impressive game put together by a group of very talented and skilled people. A lot of the visual can gags (unfortunately not a literal statement) were genuinely pretty funny or charming. Even if I sort of just rolled my eyes through the writing (not meant to be a rating of quality, honestly - it felt just "not for me") it's impressive how much of it there is and how it does tell a whole story in just these little blurbs. The voice actors were an impressive inclusion and the work to subtitle and translate what they say is nice, even if (in my taste - not universally, maybe) it's more "jokey" than "helpful".

I would just never play this again.