Sandcastle is an instant splashback to childhood
It's on my bucket list
I have long dreamt of this game. The elevator pitch is so simple and straightforward that it was an inevitability, and yet it has taken years for someone to do the premise justice. Sandcastle is a sandbox game in the most literal sense - all you do is build a sandcastle as the tide washes in and out, slowly eroding the walls and turrets of your small fortress.
You get buckets, spades, bits of old wood. There is no goal. You are a kid on the beach and nobody is coming to put more sunscreen on you and interrupt your building efforts.
I barely need to describe it any further. You get the entire idea from the video above. There are different types of wall to build (do you like your crenellations in classic or gothic flavour?) along with various sizes of sand bucket, and a bunch of decorative trinkets to save from the waves. Miniature tiki torches, umbrellas, cool shells, that sort of thing. Glass bottles will wash up and you click on them to unlock new building tools, like a handy trowel or a neat little roller that will smoosh everything flat.
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Fields Of Mistria review
Stuck between a rock and a soft place
Fields Of Mistria is a game with almost no friction. When you’re farming crops, your watering can is always full. When you’re catching fish, there’s no minigame but waiting for the bite. If you forage something but don’t have room in your backpack, it will sit where you left it. After not too long, you’ll unlock the lost and found system, meaning on the next Monday it will be whisked away into a big bucket conveniently near your farm for you to collect.
And, I think because of this, my experience with Mistria is strange. It’s soothing to zone out for an hour and run through several days of wandering around the village and farming, mining, fishing, gifting bits and bobs to NPCs and so on, all working towards new ticks on the game’s absolutely massive checklist. And my checklist is getting full. The museum is overflowing; the mines are reopened down to the depths; my heart levels with the villagers are almost complete. I can’t deny that that feeling of pleasure, while insubstantial, has led to me sinking nearly 70 hours into the game in the last month or so, and I can’t deny enjoying it.
But I can say it has also been grating. During the low-tension cycle of the daily tasks, there’s plenty of time for thinking about both the (inherent?) political tensions of the farming simulator and the issues I have with this one in particular (more on both of those later). And yet I keep falling for just one more day. And even when I do decide I want to do something more thoughtful, give me a few hours and I’ll think, damn, breaking a few hundred more rocks with a pickaxe sounds really good right now, actually.
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The Lie-In
Links worth clicking
Good morning, videogames. Last week's Lie-In was written in advance to cover for my absence, and frankly it was rude for people to continue publishing articles while I was away. Now this week's Lie-In needs to somehow contain almost two weeks of links to writing about videogames. Terrible for me; a bumper crop for you.
Aftermath launched Hater Week, a batch of articles in which they got a lot off their chests. I love this idea. Here's Gita Jackson on why survival games are annoying.
A video game character does not need to eat, drink, or sleep. They do not need to take their meds every day. They don’t go to the bathroom, or get hair cuts, or trim their nails—all these tiny chores that take up time in my life that I never think about but must complete. So why, why, would I play a video game where doing all these chores is not only necessary, but the point.
Speaking of haters, academic and translator Emily Wilson discussed her distaste for Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey. Wilson published a translation of the Odyssey in 2017 and knows her stuff, at
Jank Mail: It's EAver
This week in PC gaming
It’s been another week in PC gaming, plus an extra day because I had some family business so apologies for the late running. Jeremy Peel kicked things off by explaining that Microsoft has always been a problem for PC gaming so we should not expect it to change now. Yes, they gave us DirectX, but they also gave us Games For Windows Live.
It was never clear what value GFWL offered players. Nobody wanted its achievements, Gamerscore or messaging functionality, since the social hubs of PC gamers existed elsewhere. The much-vaunted crossplay between Windows and Xbox 360 barely materialised. And of course, it was the home to plenty of clumsy DRM, a role that sealed its fate in the court of public opinion. GFWL was there to police players rather than to help them.
Graham somehow curated good game writing without even being here. Upon his return he reviewed Emuurom and wants you to know that while it contains vast and complex depths you can still enjoy it for much simpler reasons.
If you love Animal Well and Blue Prince, I think Emuurom could be your new favourite game. Someone less dummy than me might therefore
A Backrooms movie? No, I want a waterpark inspired by Pools
Waterslide into my DMs
My hometown swimming pool had this one weird corridor. It was a long, tiled hall from the men's changing room to the main pool. This narrow corridor housed an ankle-deep pool of water, which you stepped down into, went on about two or three metres, and then you stepped out. I think the idea was that your feet are disgusting and must be cleansed before they are allowed to meet other feet. Whatever the rationale, this footbath came to feel like a ritual. A hoofwade before you plunged in proper, a minor something to pass through on your way to better water. It gave a sense of anticipation to this long wet hall. The sound of laughter and whistles echoed from the far end, and to get to those sounds you had to splosh through a rectangular puddle full of concentrated foot cells. Gross, a bit creepy, but also sort of fun.
That swimming pool is gone now. They bulldozed it and built a new one the next town over. But I thought of its weird hallway more than once as I waded through the eerie and abandoned megaleisure complex of Pools. It is suggested this place is a mysterious and sinister purgatory, but I would 100% visit it in real life.
Pools is a walking simulator from 2024 based on the internet fad of "liminal space", the same uncanny architectural Reddit fuel that spawned the Backrooms. You wake up in an echoing and dripping waterworld and are forced to explore its labyrinth of swimming pools. It is a cathedral to chlorine. The sound design is incredible. Walk from one tightly flooded tunnel into a huge cistern with towering pillars and you can hear the entire atmosphere change. Sure, this is a first-person wanderabout for stoned architecture students, but it's also just a good soak for the senses. It is the closest I have come to feeling wet through a screen.
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What you could play this weekend
Plus what we're playing
I am back from my Scottish absence, which means that instead of being prepared a week in advance, this article is being written in real-time. Click on it quick enough and you can see my cursor still scrabbling across the screen, laying out words about three new games you might like to try this coming weekend - and, as a new bonus, adding words from the Jank crew on what we're hoping to divert ourselves with this weekend.
Let us know in the comments, as always, what you're going to be playing.
Sovereign Tower
I've been reading Tower Dungeon, Tsutomu Nihei's manga which answers the question: what if there was a big tower? This RPG makes you the manager of such a place, with a Round Table of hot knights to send on quests and keep happy. I love the loose lines of the character artwork and UI, and am encouraged by the ability to turn back time (via a demon in the basement) to reverse previous decisions.
Doloc Town
If I encountered Doloc Town when it launched in Early Access last year, I forgot about it, but this sidescrolling survival-farming game has now hit
Total Playtime: The Coriander Of Space Marines
Taste explosions
Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.
It’s a free-to-all episode this week, so Alice, Nate and myself turned ourselves to the major issues of the day: Xboxes are really expensive, how a Skyrim username error can get you wrongly imprisoned for soliciting minors, a new Thimbleweed Park and a very detailed explanation of how good the Space Marine x Helldivers 2 partnership is.
Join us for a detailed overview of the Astra Militarum, a half-remembered summary of the Xbox P&L and a fleeting cameo from Alice’s dog. Plus: children who chew on cigars from birth, engaging worm protocol, and clown husbandry.
Our music is by God Ribbon, our art is by Marsh Davies and this week our editing is by Dave of the Sonic The Comic podcast who did a banger job even with limited guidance. Thanks to backers of Jank (formerly
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