Nicholas’s Review of New Task Available

God, it would be wild if this existed in real life.

New Task Available is an online porn story written by an author who uses the handle Antagonized Penguin on Archive of Our Own (and similar handles elsewhere), about is about a horny app that makes its players do horny shit in public for money. The story is an anthology of different players, and it’s surprisingly addictive—and I’m not the only one who thinks so if the story’s hit count is any indication.

This review is going to contain some minor spoilers for New Task Available, but it’s not a super big deal because it’s not exactly a plot-heavy story.

The premise of the story is that there’s an app called Brave Boys that, if you sign up for it, gives you tasks that you have to complete for points, and at the end of each round, you get some money depending on how many points you earn. The tasks are all horny exhibitionist stuff like getting naked in public and having sex with strangers in the park or whatever. Like I said above, each chapter is about a different character, so you see different kinds of approaches to the game and different kinds of stuff being done. Some of the stuff in the story definitely might not be for everyone, but honestly I feel like it has pretty broad appeal for a niche porn story.

I guess the thing about it that I really like is that it’s kind of realistic in a weird way. The way the story is written, you could easily believe that something like this was happening in the background everywhere you go and you’d just never noticed because you were looking your phone or your friend’s ass or whatever. How many of us would really notice if some kid three tables over from us in the food court had his dick out? If you saw a guy at a urinal with his pants around his ankles, you’d just assume he was a bit weird, not that he was playing some horny game. And in the story, the app is so omnipresent that it’s good at shielding its players from being seen by the kind of people who wouldn’t be into it. Like, they’re in public places all the time, but usually only two or three people end up seeing them and those people end up being totally fine with getting a blowjob from a kid who wants to earn points. So yeah, you could totally see how a game like this could just fit into the background of our world, honestly.

The premise is really cool and all, but you wouldn’t think it would be able to sustain a longer story for more than horny reasons. It seems more like the premise of a one-off thing to hear it, because you’d think the idea of ‘boys doing stuff in public’ would get old pretty fast. But after eight chapters it still hasn’t, and I think that’s because the characters are so legitimately compelling. Like, this story isn’t some great drama with epic character arcs or whatever, and each chapter is only like six thousand words and then you generally don’t see the character in it again, but the author does such a great job of making the characters feel like real people that you really get invested in them and their point-earning over the course of the chapter. There’s just something so realistic seeming about Troy’s carefree attitude even as he strives to win the game for the first time by letting a guy fuck him in a park, or Emmett’s anxiety about being a quitter in front of his hot dad, or Reggie letting the kids he babysits (who are secretly his half-brothers) call the shots as he scores his points and afterwards. The characters are all so different, but I feel like I can relate to all of them in different ways as we watch them move through their world (with no clothes on).

The third chapter is about the best player in the game, who’s so good at it he’s ended up leaving his home and family so he can play, and he gets adopted by the guy who runs the thing. It should be super skeevy and pervy, but it’s actually weirdly wholesome and touching when you see it play out, even if Lee does have a butt plug in the whole time (it’s so he doesn’t get cum on the seats). That chapter has so many cool consequences too, because even though the story doesn’t have an overarching plot yet, Lee has all these ideas to improve the game and you steadily start to see them implemented in a lot of later chapters, which I think is a really cool bit of worldbuilding. You also see the app getting just a little less skeevy as the story goes on (if partly because “always spying on everything you do and say and financially encouraging you to get naked in the mall” isn’t presented as skeevy in the story), which is also kind of clearly because of Lee’s influence, and I think it’s super cool how you can still feel him so long after his chapter—he pretty iconically told us that he never half-asses anything that involves his whole ass (it just felt so much like something Isaac would say that I couldn’t help but remember it), and he clearly meant that, because he’s definitely putting his whole ass into making his game better for everyone to play. I have a feeling we’re going to see some more consequences of that pretty soon too, and I’m looking forward to it.

The seventh chapter was co-written by the main author and his friend, and it deals with some pretty intense themes of abuse and stuff, which I think it handles pretty well (though I’m not an abuse survivor, so maybe I’m wrong), and pretty sensitively and stuff, though still in the context of a porn universe, obviously. It really highlights how the app takes care of its players and its inclusivity. New Task Available is also part of a series that has stories by two other authors as well, and I think it’s super cool how multiple people have contributed such awesome stuff to it as a shared universe. There really is room for everyone in this series, which again feels like a weird thing to say about a porn story but it’s true. I mean, it’s a gay porn story and there’s room in it for me, even. A lot of the characters tell us in their chapters that they’re actually straight and just sort of doing all this gay public sex to win the game, and I can kind of see that, you know? Like, if this app existed in real life I’d definitely play, and if you’re going to play a game, you may as well at least try to win, right?

The author does obviously have a bit of a thing for incest, since five of eight chapters at least imply that players have done tasks with their family members, mostly their brothers, and three of those five are focused on that kind of dynamic. But hey, it makes for good porn, so more power to him, I figure. It’s a bit silly to read a porn story and then poke at the author for the kinks in that story, since we all have kinks. Some of us like to think about brothers fucking, some of us like to imagine walking naked around a block and giving a blowjob, and that’s all fine.

New Task Available really does have something for everyone (as long as you’re into the central kink of exhibitionism and public sex, I guess), and I really can’t recommend it enough even if you’re not into gay porn. It’s a really well written story with compelling and interesting characters who really feel like real people, doing stuff that isn’t realistic but feels like it could be, and that’s honestly all you can really ask for out of a story, I think. It’s made me keep my eyes open more in the real world just in case this is secretly a real thing I didn’t know about.

And maybe if I’m lucky the author will see this review and consider writing a chapter about some players in a boarding school or something. He’s got chapter nine planned already, but maybe for chapter ten. Asking for a friend.