The Lie-In
Links worth clicking, mostly
Good morning, videogames. Some weeks, no great writing about gaming comes to me organically and I need to make a special effort to go looking for it. I hope you appreciate the sacrifices I have made for you this week in reading and rejecting several dreadful reviews, previews and features to find even a handful I could bring myself to share. Thankfully, once the games are out of the way, I get to link to a great and somewhat horny article by a nonagenarian.
One of the pumping limpets clinging to the walls of bilge-filled cultural adulterant PC Gamer With Airs wrote a review of Roman Sands RE:Build that is worth putting your waders on for.
Each of those component games is a short masterpiece, executed with huge prowess at every level of the art, sound, design and writing. They might seem totally dissimilar, at first. One game is a hyperactive, time-looping hotel job simulator in which you tend to some cartoonishly awful older guests, shifting incrementally between times of day as you hurry between parts of a garish and phantasmagorical resort that is being menaced by an approaching sun. It's a place without memory, in
Jank Mail: Eternal fetch quests
This week in PC gaming
The week is over and it's definitely autumn now, which I don't care for, but there are some good games and good words to comfort us as the evenings draw in. For the latter, we did some important financial journalism to find out who could make the most without spending any money in Wardogs, and I won't say who won on money but Brendy definitely won on depravity:
I crawl forward to a screaming teammate, lying in the grass ahead of me, and take his machine gun, helmet, and armour. I turn to crawl away, and then think better of it. I turn to revive him. Because it will earn me money. Unfortunately, two other people have had the same idea. We all crowd around our fallen comrade, rubbing our hands together like three fuckbois warming their hands over a Tinder profile.
Sin reviewed Ostranaughts, which is entirely our sort of game (derogatory):
You also get lowercase jank. Lots of it. "Bordering on a professional dilemma" kind of jank. There is so much going wrong with this game that I'm unsure if this will be a recommendation or an SOS.
We passed 900 wonderful, attractive, charismatic
What you could play this weekend
And what we are playing
Dare I spend a huge chunk of money on Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave? I haven't loved an entry in the turn-based tactics series since Awakening, and there's a chance I'd be buying something a hundred hours-long that I only end up playing for six. Plus, I have Star Wars: Zero Company right here, waiting, unplayed, if I want some turn-based shenanigans.
And yet, it looks new and shiny. Below you'll find three other new and shiny things you could spend money on, but tell us what you're actually playing in the comments. And what I should do about Fire Emblem.
Trails In The Sky 2nd Chapter
The next entry in Nihon Falcom's ongoing remake project for their classic JRPG series. Trails games are long and numerous, with airships, melodrama, and both turn-based and real-time hack-and-slash combat. I played a couple of hours of the previous game in the series and It Was Not For Me, but if you're more tolerant of cumbersome tutorialisation and adoptive sibling romance then I hear there's a great world and story to explore and hundreds of hours of games
Total Playtime: Question-mark Interrobang?‽
Welcome to 2030 Week
Alice is away this week, so three grown men got to sit around and puzzle over a particularly baffling week of news items and become steadily less certain that we were describing reality.
There were some positives: Nate got to let a year’s worth of Hearthstone annoyance off his chest, Brendy got to drop an unexpected Halo deep cut, and I got to talk about a nice cat that I met. All solid therapeutic behaviours. Plus: subscribing to Accomplished Shootsman Magazine, earning money for being meat in the room, and surviving the horrors of modern capitalism. You can listen right here on this page, or find us in many of the places you get your podcasts.
Our music is by God Ribbon, our art is by Marsh Davies and our editing is by Alix Attenborough. The podcast only exists thanks to those who subscribe to Jank (and previously funded us on Patreon) who are additionally rewarded with an extra episode every other week dedicated to things like our videogame book club and the developing trials of Games Satan. Subscribe today and get us closer to being able to afford Brendy full-time.
What's On Your Bookshelf?: Esoteric Ebb's Christoffer Bodegård
"I've heard it's similar to Disco Elysium. But Miéville’s must be better, because he has two"
Hell is ascendant. The nightmare moon hangs askew in the rust-blighted sky, low enough to reach down and steal a bite of your waffle cone. Again!
To your left, a battle-worn clowder of gangrenous strays mew the theme to The Godfather, miring your senses in discordant trills : Meooow Mow-mow mooow mow mow-mow.
From beyond the veil, exactly 58 tiny voices scrape at your fragile subconscious, each trying to tell you about a different roguelike card-battler released in the last four hours. Every one of them is 'must play', they insist. (whispery voice) Must play. Must play. Must Play.
Quick. Get inside. It's safe here. We have gathered all the videogames and burned them alive. Only books remain.
Welcome.
Welcome to the inaugural Jank-dition of What's On Your Bookshelf - our regular chat with a selection of excellent game-humans about books! Kicking things off, it's none other than Esoteric Ebb's Christoffer Bodegård! Cheers Chris - mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
Liberal Fascisms! One of many essay collections of Žižek, his latest I believe. Once I got out of the slump of extreme-hardcore-crunch, writing thousands of words a day all throughout 2025 and up to Ebb's launch, I needed a cleanser. Or at least a solid hook to start reading again. I find Slavoj Žižek's pop-culture zeitgeist lens incredibly entertaining, and his work gives me the exact same dopamine rush I get from watching overtly political YouTubers rant about current day topics, except I get to actually stop and look up/learn about new sources/concepts/words every other page or so.
I'm also working my way through the Tales of Dunk and Egg! For one reason: I very much enjoyed the dread of watching Game of Thrones slowly collapse into complete sadness - starting with season 4 - since I read ahead to Dance after season 2 dropped. After watching AKOTSK with the boys (which was an experience), I decided to jump onto that same ship once more. I mean, I really hope the following seasons hold up. But now I'm invested, so bring on the pain!
What's On Your Bookshelf has returned thanks to new supporters of Jank helping us to reach one of our subscriber goals! Thanks to everyone who signed up over the past month.
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How much money can we make in Wardogs on a $0 budget?
Paupers, please
They finally invented Ayn Rand's Battlefield. Wardogs is the sort of huge multiplayer team battler you are familiar with, except now you have a bank balance. You earn a wad of cash with every kill, revive, heal, drop-off, or bit of construction work. Destroy a sandbag for a meagre $14. Blow up a vehicle to pocket a cool $300. Kill a person - that's $2,250. You then use that cash to buy weapons, armour, ammo, and vehicles. The profit motive drives everything.
"You have to spend money to make money," says a gruff NPC vendor, expounding the game's philosophy. Well, fuck you, shop with a mouth. We will not spend a single dollar. Instead, the Jank writers have instigated the ultimate test of tightfistedness. Which of us can make the most money in Wardogs without spending anything? Let's find out.
The rules
Our goal for this challenge is to earn as much cash as possible. We must spend $0. We are allowed five lives, and we are going in cold. That means we have not played the game before, except to do the tutorial. Less Wardogging, more Rawdogging, if you will.
This will not be easy. Even a hammer to build sandbags, or a wrench to fix vehicles can cost 50 warbucks. Reliable firearms are much dearer. Spawning a fighter jet is out of the question. Every player starts with $10,000 when they buy the game. We're not allowed to use any of it. Let's see how we get on.
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Ostranauts review
Everything can be salvaged, but make it a curse
"Ostranauts, Graham, is I think a very Jank-y kind of game", I said, very differently to that and before I needed to fit it into an intro. This came from dabbling with much earlier versions, and from knowing that Graham loved Neo Scavenger, Blue Bottle Games's earlier survival game about undignified scrabbling and lusting after carrier bags. And that Brendy is a space boy, and Jonty touches cars. Throw in my love of salvage and you get a game about bumbling around space in a ship assembled by hand, one reclaimed component at a time. You get Ostranauts.
You also get lowercase jank. Lots of it. "Bordering on a professional dilemma" kind of jank. There is so much going wrong with this game that I'm unsure if this will be a recommendation or an SOS.
It is a project game. I have a goal, and I see other possibilities on the way to meeting that goal. Some of those are incorporated into the project, others distract me and become the day's entertainment before I try again tomorrow. Others still become another project and oh my god what day is it. What year?
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The Lie-In
Links worth clicking
Good morning, videogames. I normally write this article on a Saturday night after my kid has gone to bed, but he was at a sleepover at a friend's house yesterday. This slight change in routine was enough to completely throw me off. I spent the night playing games and only remembered The Lie-In when I went to bed at 2am. Consider this tardy issue of The Lie-In as bleary-eyed and emotionally fragile as my 10-year-old normally is after staying up all night with four friends, yet still full of links worth reading.
There are a million little ways in which the social contract is eroded by social media mega-sites. Laura Michet writes about "self-censorship practices as anti-shibboleth"; how a failure to signal that you've learned the rules, or that you know there are rules to learn, makes it harder to extend trust and respect.
In my experience, self-censoring adult terminology on that site in particular is a great sign that you're dealing with someone so incurious, with such a limited experience of online conversation, that they don't understand where they are, or who they're dealing with,
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