Hello, enjoyers of Jank. I am informed there are a lot of new readers among you, swamping through the gates thanks to a brutal takedown of Dungeon Crawler Carl. Come in, come in, warm yourself by the burning effigy of Ernest Cline. I think you're going to like it here.
This newsletter is normally scribbled by Jonty. But this week he's missing, presumed on holiday. I'll do my best to fill your eyes with games industry newsbits in his absence. This will be difficult. I've been distracted because I have only this week learned of Jimothy, a creature which is either a raccoon in Seattle with shortened spine syndrome, or the latest cryptid stalking America, depending on who you ask. Anyway, I'll try. Onto the videogames.
We began the week with a brawl. The season finale of Character Select (in which we pit game characters against one another) saw Max Payne, Octodad, Dog from Half-Life 2, the Flood from Halo, and SkiFree's Yeti having a free-
Asha Sharma wants to call the recent layoffs at Xbox-owned game studios a "reset". This is because of the connotations the word brings - a reset is a mildly disruptive way to solve a problem. When your PC is being glitchy, a reset is kind of annoying, but it fixes things. When you have over-complicated a spreadsheet, a reset will take everything back to the start. A reset has the feel of icy water splashed on your face during a difficult day, a dive into a cold pool when your week is going bad. A clean slate. A fresh do-over. A reset is a brief but ultimately freeing moment of discomfort or inconvenience, followed by excitement at a new start.
This is not that. The wrecking ball currently crashing through Xbox is anything but cleansing. If we are to use a word or phrase to describe the ongoing layoffs, why not reach for words which truly reflect the human cost, impact and intent of the action. How about "bloodletting" or "demolition job"? What about "slash and burn"? This is an act of cutting, violent in its method, drastic in scope and ultimately a form of self-inflicted
Nothing makes me feel quite so motivated as a camping trip, and not in a good way. It's like when you get to the end of a long holiday and right before you're due to return to work, you feel this sudden burst of inspiration to do all the things you soon won't be able to. I could have started a running habit or become the sort of person who gets up at 6am and meditates, but alas, I'm going camping this weekend. I could have played all these new videogames, but alas, I'm going camping this weekend.
Here's what you could be playing. Tell us what you are playing in the comments below.
The latest game in the Detective Grimoire series, and another standalone mystery to solve. This one is a locked room murder, and unlike its predecessor, every clue is a 3D object you can rotate and explore in search of secrets. It's also fully voiced and wonderfully animated, if the trailers are any indication. I need to make time to play this.
Yet more selfless ideation for the industry's benefit
Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, formerly funded by Patreon. Every two weeks we publish a backer-only episode hosted by Alice Bell, Nate Crowley, Jonty and Brendan. You can listen to this and all previous Patreon-exclusive episodes by subscribing to Jank.
This week is a rare two-header, as Nate and I convened to workshop some future games in the Alien Isolation franchise, as a service to Creative Assembly once they’ve finished the second one. The results are… surprisingly plausible pitch ideas, although I foresee some real hassle getting the rights squared away.
With the benefit of hindsight, I should have read the dedication in Dungeon Crawler Carl as 'HERE THERE BE MONSTERS'. What it actually says is the following:
This version of Dungeon Crawler Carl is dedicated to the star of one of the greatest, most inspiring, most amazing survival stories of our time.
Fiona.
Fiona the hippo.
Yes, I am dedicating this book to a goddamned hippopotamus.
Sorry, Mom.
It really has everything. A zaniness hovering between being insecure and smug. Graceless repetition because the prose wasn't structured properly in the first instance. A self-conscious swearword to indicate that what's happening is funny. A gesture toward emotion as an afterthought. My god, if it isn't a perfect distillation of the whole book.
I picked up Dungeon Crawler Carl on a recommendation from multiple people I trust, and now will never trust again. It's the first entry in a LitRPG series that is both self-published online (visionary auteur Matt Dinniman has kept the digital rights, an incredibly baller move) and now trad-published in book stores.
Dungeon Crawler Carl has an air of originality because, while LitRPGs have been popular in countries like Japan, Korea and Russia for a while, this time it's about a cool white American dude. Our titular Carl is 6'3", jacked, and weirdly defensive about having been a member of the Coast Guard. Without warning every building on Earth and anyone inside them is destroyed - "splattered into dust" at "approximately 2.23 am", as we are told on literally page one, and if you think that's another sign of bad things to come, you're correct.
"The times when Dinniman writes something dense with subtext, it's because he's done so accidentally"
Objectively incorrect use of words and their meanings aside, the set up is fine, I guess. The middle of the planet is transformed into a multi-layered videogame-esque dungeon by the genocidal aliens now in charge. Carl, along with a prize showcat called Princess Donut belonging to Carl's ex-girlfriend, and several million other members of humanity, take their chances in the dungeon. Their exploits as Crawlers are televised across the galaxy in a daily reality TV show.
The LitRPG genre leaves in the tedious grinding and stat fiddling that you do in a videogame, but sort of excise from your memories of playing it. In Dungeon Crawler Carl, your brain has to suffer through multiple paragraphs like:
"She also received a dozen Heal scrolls from a Silver Survivor's Box. That one was rewarded to her because she'd ended a boss battle with less than 5% of her health. The scrolls were good to have because there was no countdown between reading each one, and even better yet, we could use the scrolls on each other."
I didn't have a specific quote in mind then, I just opened the book at random. There's even a supporting character who's the head of the Tutorial Guild and may as well be called Basil Exposition. Info dumps like this happen once a page or so, sometimes in the middle of the universally boring fights, and are all delivered in this repetitive, basic style with very few sentences of varying length. It's leaden.
More than that, it's dead. Nothing comes alive, adjectives are rare and a vanishing few of them are sensory. The dungeon is "dark" and "big". Goblins turn up a lot in this book, and the first Carl meets look "much like they did in movies and video games." Masterful stuff. I will give Dinniman an amount of credit for coming up with a reason why the dungeon is full of references to Earth pop-culture. And at least he shows more restraint than Ernest Cline.
We love a good internet toy here in the Jank yard. Clipart.studio is a time-wastin' gizmo by designer Sami Smith that lets you cut out bits from old magazine PDFs saved in the Internet Archive, and stick them together on a canvas in a work of collage art. The digital-only downside is that you cannot later peel the dried PVC glue off your fingers like a big snake molting its skin in the desert. Ah, well.
The magazines are many. You can clip the curls out of Cosmo, the singers out of Smash Hits, and the parasites out of Popular Science. But of course there is a solid core of 1990s-2000s videogame mags to rip and/or tear from. PC Zone, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Nintendo Power, and Play are the ones that show up the most. You can also add your own PDFs to snip from, if you are so inclined.
The tools are simple - slice and dice, click and drag, undo, and shift the clipouts from front to back. Export your final collage when you're done and show off to friends who I guarantee will not care about your finished masterwork but will care
To investigate the deaths at the Galley house, you'll first have to familiarise yourself with the machine. By inputting a time code, location, and the reference numbers for the people present, you'll be able to view that moment. Or, more accurately, hear it. Although you can occasionally pick out clues from the background art, and assign avatars to the hazy shadows once you've figured out which of the photographs in your inventory they correspond to, it's most important to pay attention to what they're saying.
The whole mystery unspools in these aural moments: people arguing and suddenly discovering dead bodies, the thunderstorm a constant accompaniment. It's a game that is predominantly a listening experience. Which is why it's surprising that The Incident at Galley House began life as Type Help, a text-based browser game.
Although the puzzling itself has been expanded, this transformation is predominantly a case study in the power of UI. I found Galley House's story to be solidly "pretty good," but combined with this upgraded presentation - the clunk of the strange machine, the generator flickering out every so often, the voice acting and audio design - I spent plenty of time genuinely creeped out. This isn't something I've experienced while simply reading, but it's also not something I've experienced in any of the other games that Galley House is inspired by, like Return of the Obra Dinn or The Roottrees are Dead.
You may remember the brutal massacre that occurred while I was on paternity leave. In the first season of Character Select, we pitted heroic game characters against one another in bloodthirsty brawls and let you argue on their behalf. After careful review of the duels (and comments in support of the various fighters) we can confirm at least five beloved fictional personalities have perished, although the true death toll is probably closer to 50. (Spoilers: the entire population of Stardew Valley has been killed.)
The survivors are listed in the headline above, however, keen-eyed readers may notice the presence of yet more "vs" between them - the dread abbreviation. Well done. You have discovered the truth: the great killing spree is not over. In this gore-soaked season finale, those who remain must now face off in a ferocious free-for-all. Only one will walk away. You, reader, will decide who.
Before we crack on to the battle royale. Let's review the destruction that came before. Thanks to all Jankers who commented with their version of events. In the fight summaries below we've selected our favourite battle outcomes from your collective twisted imaginings. Crowdsourced violence, it's
