Brendan is a critic and games journalist with 15 years experience, and writer on a few indie games which he is honour-bound never to talk about on Jank.
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.
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.
Hello to all fans of watching sand hypnotically pass through the bottleneck of an hourglass, I come to you with a gift. Sir, We Have An Orc Problem is a snacky kill 'em all about fending off a flood of little green murderers with lasers, flamethrowers, and cannons. There are so many of the wee freaks that they move like the particles of a physics-based fluid. It is pleasing to look at even before you find the choke points of each level and blast each small pillager into bloodbits with a mortar barrage.
It's cheap, it's chewable, and it reminds me, in the best possible way, of a compulsive Flash game that would have swept over every PC in my secondary school like a greasy, green plague of wicked idleness. Please, look at these runny GIFs and tell me you are not intrigued.
It is classic tower defence in many ways. You place turrets 'n' Tesla coils and try to stem the flow of attackers before they cross a threshold and slurp up all your health. You get extra abilities to help out in a pinch. You can call in an airplane strafing run. You
Jank has been alive for six months. That's older than some babies I know. Since our launch at the dawning of the year we've been writing non-stop, except for the hours 9am to 5pm, which is when we have to work real jobs to feed our families, dogs, and cars. Like many of you, we are not permitted to Jank on company time.
This hasn't slowed us down. We've written over 200 articles so far, and commissioned more from our favourite word mercenaries roaming the land. You've maybe missed a few of these articles and I don't blame you - you're a busy person, you have obscure JRPGs to play I have never heard of. So here's a round-up of our best work so far. Alongside a quick look at our plans for the future.
We reviewed new and old games
We've reviewed 17 games in total so far, which may not sound like much compared to bigger websites. But look at us, we're tiny. Some sites no longer bother to write reviews at all, or only focus on the big releases. But we don't discriminate between
If aliens are watching, I hope they can't see the state of my bedroom. Voices Of The Void is a job sim about being a lonely engineer in a remote signals laboratory, pointing big satellites at the sky in the search for extraterrestrial life. You are like Jodie Foster in Contact, except less qualified. It is extremely my cup of hot tea. It is also about living in a disgusting dormitory full of cockroaches.
I spent the first hours in this surprisingly complex and funny sim not pressing buttons on the old analogue machinery required to do my job, but instead sweeping up years of rubbish that had piled up in the abandoned lab before I took over. Chinese takeaway cartons, bottles, fried circuit boards, busted keyboards, indeterminate pulp. If the little grey men do send a message, I might miss it. I am busy scrubbing the toilet.
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Living In Sim is our monthly column about simulation games, and the frequently stupid misadventures they inspire.
You arrive to the lab in the dead of night, your first task to simply go around switching on the lights in every room. You read the emails waiting for you on the computer running on the desk. Your science boss wants you to record signals from space and send the recordings to them every day on hard drives, alongside other data on a big tape reel. I ignore the emails, take a look around, find the cleaner's closet, and come back with a roll of black bin bags. I am NOT working in this absolute shit hole until I have at least cleaned up my desk.
Big concrete is taking over. There are now enough megastructures in games to justify a whole bundle on Steam. You may not be familiar with the term "megastructure" if you've not yet been cornered by your architecture-obsessed pal in the pub, or by your manga mate who keeps telling you to read Blame. It is basically an artificial space so huge you can't easily conceptualise it. One enormous planet-covering city encased in a shell. An orbital world many thousands of kilometers in circumference. Thatawful shopping mall in Edmonton, Alberta.
Big weird places that make you feel like an insignificant pipsqueak, essentially. Megastructures are not new to videogames. The subterranean complex of Portal 2 stretched further than fans of the first game would have guessed, and the cavernous corridors of Halo suggest a galaxy of long-lost giants. But now indie developers are increasingly exploring these colossal spaces. And small developers, it turns out, go pretty big.
"I spent quite a lot of time in my childhood staring out at vast roads from nearby hills full of little travelling dots," says Aleksandra Herout, developer of Metal Garden, a first-person shooter set in a drab land with a titanic concrete ceiling for a sky. "As the place I grew up in is a transport hub for the greater region, there was much of this architecture to be found in local landscapes.
"It wasn't just the size that made them stick with me, but also the sense of anticipation. The promise that this open road would lead me somewhere else. I kept returning to this feeling again and again throughout my life, and it very much impacted the visual language of Metal Garden."
'It is large enough if it makes your head spin and heart pound'
In Herout's 2-3 hour singleplayer shooter, you wander lonely hilltops and lurk through deep blocky catacombs, routinely blasting dark gunfolk and beefy catlads who - it is suggested - have caught wind of a priceless discovery: a way out of the structure. The shotguns and sniper rifles are straightforward, and the jetboot doublejump is as satisfying as equivalent leaps in Destiny 2. But it's the landscape that makes Metal Garden easy to recommend (plus it costs peanuts).
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
