Brendan Caldwell - Jank (Page 2)

22 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Questions

Can a game be 'so bad it's good'?

I'm asking but I already know

One day, as we all sat around in our splintered cyberlimbo slurping up the feeds and making absolutely no effort to better ourselves, a reader called Akwan entered the chat channel of Jank's subscriber-only Discord like a quiet ghost with a stinking fish carcass. "Just out of curiosity," they said, with the tone of somebody who may or may not know the grenade they are holding has zero pins. "Does anyone here have a computer game they think is 'so bad that it's good'? I've seen movies I think fall in that category but no computer game comes to mind."

Suddenly, everyone woke up.

I enjoy the forum-post-as-conversational-pipe-bomb, and this instantly qualified. When you think of "so bad it's good" movies you might think of big dumb fun in a vintage Arnie movie, or cult stinker The Room. This kind of movie is easy enough to identify even if it's impossible to draw the line at any specific point. Sometimes just a concept is enough (Snakes On A Plane, Sharknado) but in many instances it is all down to the dialogue and the delivery of that dialogue.

I will never stop telling people how good Ace Combat 7 is, and

18 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Reviews

Review: Anthology of the Killer

I don't need an excuse to do this but I've got one anyway

How late can one review a game? Pointless question, I don't care to hear your answer. Anthology Of The Killer has been out on PC for a while, but it was released on the Nintendthing and Player's Station V this week, bringing the comedy crime caper to the respective audiences of baffled children and tired parents who've forgotten they even have a subscription to PS Plus. This act launches the game back into what we may generously call the Public Eye. Ow! Poor eye.

This gives me the perfect opportunity to finally do what I neglected to do when the game came out two entire years ago (oh no time's inexorable stomp etc etc). That is to say: here follows a non-thorough yet official evaluation of thecatamites' comedy slasher. The video game review continues to be a relevant form.

BB converses with a voice from the audience as she moves through corridors made of curtain.

If you are new to this developer's homebrew bafflements, fear not. Anthology is as good a jumping in point as any. This is a mechanistically simple game of walking about and looking at things until you feel one emotion or another, I won't dictate to you which. BB is a zine maker in a city of terrible murders. Every episode sees

13 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

The best singleplayer levels in first-person PC games

Let me level with you

Last week we confronted Jank readers with the 17 best multiplayer FPS maps in living and possibly unliving memory. Did you think we were finished? You imbecile. You clown. Now it's time for all the brilliant singleplayer levels. And some of them aren't even about shooting.

We had originally sat down to hash out all the finest levels in first-person games without caring how many players were enjoying the view or dying from a ruptured skull. But after compiling that megalist we realised: my god, if we split this monster into multiplayer and singleplayer maps... we will have TWO articles. It was a revolutionary idea, and one that has made Jank approximately 0.05% more efficient this week. We provide stupid jokes and shareholder value.

Fort Frolic - BioShock

A bunny eared enemy with hooks waits outside the doors to Fort Frolic.

Graham: Someone, somewhere is going to say: what about The Cradle, the most beloved level from Thief: Deadly Shadows? To them we say: sorry, we haven't played it. But we have played Fort Frolic, the BioShock level from the same level designer, Jordan Thomas, in which the player is trapped in a district by Sander Cohen, an artist who works across mediums, from "creepy living statues" to "classically scored murder ballet"

10 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Living In Sim

Truck Mechanic is the sim you abandon by the side of the road

Let me give you the breakdown

Living In Sim is our monthly column about simulation games, and the frequently stupid misadventures they inspire.

I like to test the boundaries of a world, and today I will do so by getting my truck into fifth gear and soaring off a bridge into a river. "Your truck has been destroyed," says a game over screen, bringing a sense of mild relief now that I cannot hear all the heinous gobshites on a walkie talkie who I have quickly grown to hate. I had such high hopes for my inaugural simulator in this much-hyped column, but here I am fully and apologetically sodden in the wet pits of a Latin American waterway. There are some car crashes that simply cannot be repaired. Truck Mechanic: Dangerous Paths is one of them.

It's a straightforward premise: all the simple pleasures of unscrewing wheel bolts and calipers in Car Mechanic Simulator 2021, but with the added terror of doing so on the edge of a deep ravine. Instead of working on bits of other people's cars in a garage for cash, you are now maintaining a single vehicle of your own, taking it screeching and sputtering across a South American landscape

08 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Here's our 17 most-loved multiplayer FPS levels

These maps lead the way to our hearts

When Graham and I sat down to scrounge together a definitive list of our favourite multiplayer first-person shooter levels, we knew that many of them would originate in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We are children of the dial-up deathmatch, so it comes as no surprise that many of our most-loved maps are simple blocky arenas made of grubby textures and low-definition skyboxes.

But what has surprised me is how the best modern maps feel like classic favourites. Any fast-paced bloodsport today still benefits from the fundamentals of map design that were hashed out by the makers and modders of yesteryear, and some of the most interesting multiplayer maps of modern times come about when studios commit to a strong theme, just like 90s developers were fond of doing, repressing any consideration of long sightlines or cheesy camping spots in favour of a single funny idea. Okay, nobody at Blizzard is making a homage to Facing Worlds. But battle royale maps that dramatically evolve are all about flavour begetting function. And the Finals definitely owes a thing or two to Quake 3. Don't get what I mean? Read on, and find out.

Crossfire - Half-Life

A blocky courtyard with a helipad in Half-Life.

Graham: It's all well

02 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

The lost wonder of Minecraft comes back in Lucid Blocks

It's Notch your usual crafting game

A hideous being stands in front of me, with a fleshy body rendered fuzzy through heavy dithering, and a cracked spherical head with the unsettling happy face of 1970s hippy logo. "O son of man," says the monster. "What lies ahead is a withering carcass. A bloated festering limbo, in which your soul will decay for all eternity."

The creature neglects to mention that this purgatory is a lot like Minecraft.

Lucid Blocks is a crafty block-bashing game about not knowing what fresh hell this is. You are very likely dead, or possibly just extremely asleep. The surreal world that forms around you is, like Minecraft, procedurally generated from a seed - in this case, a single word. You crumble blocks, gather them to your hotbar, and plop them down. There is some end goal, the creature tells you, but only in "oblivion" does it exist.

Remember your first steps into the world of Minecraft? I do. It was 2010 and I was crashing in a friend's spare room as the Yorkshire winter rendered us all desperate for ale. Minecraft was an escape into a blocky dimension where you could build a far more affordable home,

31 Mar 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Living In Sim

Living In Sim is our new column on "simulation", whatever that means

Try simulating some enthusiasm

Simulation is a huge genre, no two people will agree where it begins or ends. When a game nails "simulator" to the end of its name, like a big plank of wood, the case seems clear cut. Flight Simulator. Gas Station Simulator. Goat Simulator. But then you have all the high-level systemic games which simulate historical nation building or space exploration. Cities Skylines calls itself a simulation, so does Crusader Kings, Rimworld, Mount & Blade, and Dwarf Fortress. Racing sims distinguish themselves from arcade racers. And sports games can veer that way too. Session is a skateboarding sim in a way that Tony Hawk's is not. Football Manager 2026 is a sim, but Rematch? Hmmm.

As I am constantly reminding Jank readers, all taxonomy is folly. Viewed from the firmament, every game is a simulation. But there is often some extra pedantry or detail that pushes a game into being classified a sim. For the purposes of this column, I don't care where that fuzzy border falls, I only care that it exists. A sim is just any videogame that commits hard to the bit.

Why sims, of all genres? Well, we're a PC gaming site, and the PC does

24 Mar 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

Ah, a job sim for people who like configuring their router

The bytes must flow

Do you know how the internet works? I don't. But it might have something to do with the nine billion ethernet cables coming out of my basement like a colony of suspicious worms. This is Tower Networking Inc, a hacky wire-crossing simulator where you run an entire internet service provider out of a damp cellar in an endlessly growing high-rise.

It's also a roguelike for some god-forsaken reason, but you can turn that off in the options and just play it as a straight-up cyberpunk job sim about making sure people can read all the awful news through their smoking modems.

It hit early access in summer last year but only recently popped up in my Steam recommendations, like a 1st line support blister waiting to be popped. You can get an idea of how deeply IT-brained the game is by watching the trailer, which expertly fuses the synthetic beats of hacker-happy music with green-tinted command lines and the kind of router configuration jargon that makes normal people break out in a fearful sweat.

"Administrate the network," it announces with all the glee of a corporate training video you are mandated to watch to secure your bonus. "Troubleshoot