The Archives of Trevosa are a good place to spend a few hours
Comes with some history
The number of games is now so high, and the usefulness of search tools so low, that it’s no longer possible to conduct casual historical research. Any attempt to track the genesis of any given genre will yield only a breezy AI summary of a YouTube video on the topic that will on closer inspection have been created by somebody with an unsettling interest in phrenology, or a series of insipid best-of articles crafted exclusively to chase the final dregs of search traffic, grimly reproducing the same tired list of titles while reciting Key Search Terms like acolytes completing their rituals even as the meteorite breaks through the upper atmosphere.
I am therefore forced to rely on my own very limited experience and say that Her Story pioneered the current trend in deduction games, and The Return of the Obra Dinn set the high water mark. I nevertheless cherish The Roottrees Are Dead, which opted for a clumsy 1990s desktop as its means of discovery, a method I would still consider perfect for the form: a mix of conceptually omniscient but practically limited that’s entirely period-correct.
Beyond These Stars review
Cetacean needed
Beyond These Stars is meant for someone less jaded than me. I got used to the little society living on the space whale's back referring to themselves as "Peeps", and it's far from saccharine or overly positive, but the main energy of its campaign in particular is... nicer than I'd prefer. I wasn't particularly bothered by where its story would go as a result.
But you're not really here for that, of course. You're here because these [barely perceptible twitch] Peeps have established a home on the back of a giant space whale, and can direct it around an unfamiliar star map to discover new resources and side bits as you gradually expand their town. This part has its appeal, but I felt like tapping out long before I'd even unlocked its more exotic resources.
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The Lie-In
Links worth clicking
Good morning, videogames. All the best writing about videogames this week was published on Jank, including four reviews, four freelance articles, a podcast, several regulars (including this one) and a blog post about a chair. We still need 75 more paying members to be able to open up freelance submissions and expand our pool of writers, if any of this moves you. Otherwise, I will begrudgingly admit that other websites exist. Here's links to some of them.
I'm looking forward to the Ocarina Of Time remake, due for release on Switch 2 next month. I've not played the game since the N64 original was new, some 30 years ago, and I've forgotten most of its details. That might be ideal, going by Matthew Castle's preview of the remake for The Guardian.
The dilemma facing any remake, let alone of a game recognised as a genre-defining classic, is how closely you hew to the past. As with this year’s Star Fox revamp, Ocarina of Time finds Nintendo in a celebratory mode. It’s a polished victory lap for a game with little to prove. For newcomers it means seeing what the fuss is about
Jank Mail - Let's review
This week in PC gaming
It’s reviews season on Jank, as we issue considered judgement on the abundance of new games. Marsh kicked it off with Gears of War E-day, from the perspective of somebody whose career began when the series did:
What's changed is my personal ability to compartmentalise—or, perhaps, to kid myself that it was ever some wholly separate, harmless fantasy. Across 20 years, social media and the discourse that trails it has mangled together private, public, work, leisure, entertainment and news—of which a good portion is open-mouthed horror—such that it has toxified even the simple pleasure of smashing open a monster's head like a cantaloupe. Oh, that we lived in a simpler world, where the murder of a subhuman race of unthinking beasts could be so cleanly boxed as fantasy with no troubling intersection with the current moment at all.
Khee Hoon Chan commended experiencing Lovecraft’s open racism through the eyes of a selection of flightless birds in Penguin Colony:
There’s a surreality to seeing all these through a penguin’s perspective, one who’s mostly immune to the conflict. These scenes are beguiling because their horror is so
Total Playtime: Literacy Was Too High a Price to Pay
Somehow, Kotick returned
Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, funded entirely by 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 another bijou two-hander this week, as Alice and I meet to pick over the remains of another week in PC gaming and get the latest updates on her dog and her neighbours, both of whom are making annoying noises.
Annoying noises in gaming, meanwhile, come from the resurfacing of the GTA leaks guy (let’s face it, it’s almost certainly a guy) and the newfound union of Warner Bros and Paramount into a new games/movies behemoth. The latter now includes Bobby Kotick, about whom we have nothing bad to say. There’s also a bit of AI chat and some game recommendations, which tops up our quota just enough to merit another run of highly self-indulgent subscriber episodes plucked from the cauldron of Nate’s brain.
If you’d like to experience those subscriber episodes (along with Discord access to both
What you could play this weekend
Pineapple beatdown
We don't write news and rarely write previews here on Jank, but we still want some method of acknowledging the flurry of interesting new games that come out each week. That's what this column is for. Below you'll find brief mention of what Jon, Brendan and I are currently playing, but also three new games that we think seem worthy of at least a glance.
The comments below all that are what really matter, though. That's where you'll find games old and new, all of them interesting enough to be played by at least one person in the Jank community. Join in! It's free.
Echo Weaver
I often think, while lost in some metroidvania cave network, that I wish these games gave me information-game style tools for working out the path forward. Maybe Echo Weaver is what I've been hoping for: this is a time-loop metroidvania that everyone is comparing to Outer Wilds, in which your entire powerset is unlocked from the beginning but you need to experiment with it to learn how it works and gain the knowledge needed to progress.
Poly Fighter
A roguelike beat-'em-up where defeating
Penguin Colony review
No greater horror than empire
That fantasy-horror writer HP Lovecraft was a virulent racist and out-and-proud Anglophile is no longer esoteric knowledge. His writings are peppered with bigoted musings and contemptuous descriptions of Black people and other races, yet despite this his works remain immensely popular due to the existential nightmares they conjure. Many contemporary re-tellings of his stories, like the cottage industry of Lovecraftian videogames, simply choose to avoid his most racist rhetoric, surgically removing the prejudice in his works like cancerous cells from a body. You won’t see any Cthulhu worshippers or prisoners being referred to as "men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type" in these tales, as Lovecraft himself had described some people in The Call of Cthulhu.
Penguin Colony, however, refuses to look away from Lovecraft’s bigotry, with developers Origame Digital reinterpreting one of his novellas through an explicitly anti-colonialist lens. Based on At the Mountains of Madness, it depicts a catastrophic expedition to Antarctica in 1939 by Nazi soldiers (a group Lovecraft himself had some sympathies for), with the tale being chronicled by a British scientist named Howard Blakely. No punches are pulled, no time is wasted; within the game’s opening chapter, a camera pans towards a flag adorned with the Nazi insignia being flown in a base camp. The purpose of the expedition is clearly stated: the group was here to unearth the origins of the so-called Aryan civilization. Following in their footsteps is a Māori faction, who seek to eliminate whatever abomination the Nazis are planning to unleash.
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New Star GP review
Grand pricks
Smoke is shooting out of Sebastian Vesper's ears. I only see it on the starting grid, but Vesper is my "nemesis". That I haven't noticed until now must be infuriating. Sure enough, once the race starts, Vesper is swerving around in front of me in a frantic attempt to prevent me passing him. I do so anyway, a few corners later, but Vesper keeps close behind despite typically being one of the slower racers this season.
Arcade racing games almost always start you at the back of the pack. Your opponents are then barely sentient obstacles to be steered around as you slip into a flow state and slalom towards your inevitable victory. Not so in New Star GP. This is an arcade racer that looks at home alongside Virtua Racing, right up until it asks you what your pit strategy is going to be. Minutes later you're halfway through a Grand Prix and realising that your fuel load is making you slow, your hard tyres are carrying heavy wear, your gearbox is on the fritz, there are rain clouds on the horizon, and that you insulted Sebastian Vesper so hard in the press that his hatred for you is making his car faster.
I'm not sure there's a genre name that fits New Star GP. "Simcade" suggests it's much more of a simulation than it really is. Arcadulation gets closer, but let's not injure ourselves. New Star GP is fundamentally still as colourful and approachable as any other arcade racer, it's just one that's built layers of character and systemic consequence into every decision you make in its career mode.
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