Brendan Caldwell - Jank (Page 4)

09 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell News

Samurai Gunn 2 got rebuilt from scratch and it's still ferocious

A nippy new engine to die in

It is Sunday night and I am kicking my own severed head around on the paving stones. My brother stands on a filthy platform high above me, hand on his katana, he is grinning precisely as a terrible killer might. He dashes left and turns invisible. Not this time. I focus. An entire second passes - a lifetime. I scan the air for signs of hopping feet.

There! I fire my gun, a flaming bullet strikes a wall, hitting nothing but stone. My two hands freeze with rigor mortis anticipation just as my body is severed into two large pieces. My brother reappears, cackling. I am dead, but at least Samurai Gunn 2 has been reborn.

If you peer back through the bamboo forest of yesteryear you might remember Samurai Gunn 2 coming out in 2021 as an early access couch brawler. It was a high-functioning sequel to one of the most brutally fun multiplayer party fighters this side of Nidhogg. You get three bullets and a sword: fight.

It saw a roster of special guest characters added over a couple of years, including the little guys from Minit, a crewmate from Among Us, and the cast of

06 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

Menace wants you dead

Joke's on you, I love to die

Take a good look at that title font, you'll be seeing this shade of red a lot. Menace is the new XCOM-flavoured turn-based tactics lad who just dropped in from orbit to shoot you in the shinbones and make a mocking crybaby face at you as you bleed out. It is quite difficult.

It's also a very slow burner. I have put nine hours into the brutal early access build and all I have to show for it are three dead friends and a rocket launcher made out of sellotape. If you're familiar with Battle Brothers - the previous tactical death sentence this studio released - you'll know how it goes. You are once again raising a mercenary army, yet are persistently outnumbered, outgunned, and underfunded. There is an element of sci-fi horror to how quickly you can run out of money. In space, no one can give you a small business loan.

A dropship hovers over a desert planet as many troops stand watching it fly away. — That dropship looks a little familiar but let's say nothing.

A disaster has occurred aboard your military spaceship, and as the highest-ranking officer to survive the catastrophe, you are now in charge. Great timing, as your vessel has arrived in a foreign solar system of pirate scum,

04 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

There are only 9 types of quest, says Fallout creator - but what about these?

Let's talk quest this out

How many types of quest are there in an RPG? Shut up, the question has already been answered by Fallout creator Tim Cain, who says there are nine - count 'em - nine types of quest. When you set off as Goblonk the Brave this morning you didn't know it, but you're only going to see these nine familiar missions as you travel the kingdom. At least according to Cain.

I think he might be missing a few. More importantly, the whole idea of taxonomising quests this way risks stripping the flavour out of quest design by limiting everything to a set menu of indivisible "ingredients". We're not making a casserole here. And even if we were, why can't I put some nettles in just to see what happens? There are a lot of quests that just don't fit the mold.

First, you can watch Cain's whole video on the taxonomy here. It's interesting. And to be fair, it's more like a fifteen-minute blast of audible thoughts than any grand theory of quest design. I don't think Cain intends to publish this in a peer-reviewed journal or anything. But that doesn't mean I can't pick a thoughtfight.

04 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Peak

Three game devs climbed a mountain - epilogue

We've Peaked

So all of my interview subjects died. Big deal. We learned some things along the way, didn't we? Back in Peak's lobby (a cartoonish airport you can play around in) the developers and I have a debrief. Is there anything they've learned while playing Peak - apart from the fact that having friends is fun?

"Don't work on a game for five years," says Bennett, referencing the fact that Peak was reportedly made in just a few months, yet has sold a huge number of copies.

"Yeah," says Holly, "that's a big one, honestly... it shows how you don't need to spend a huge amount of time if you just go in with a really simple premise and kind of extrapolate your idea from there."

"Yeah, do a little less," laughs Bennett.

For a full list of articles in this series - click here

What do they think of the game itself? What's interested them most about it?

"I think it's really interesting, especially in multiplayer, if I look at the 40 minutes we've played, we've obviously climbed, but also I've been fed,

03 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Reviews

TR-49 review: sorry, I'm not up to code

An enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a primary school maths question

I feel like my brain is broken. Sci-fi mystery puzzler TR-49 is the exact sort of clue-hunting solve 'em up I normally love. But somewhere in its thorny forest of fictional author names and twentieth century dates I got lost, hacking my way through more with frustration than curiosity.

It's packaged as a codebreaking game, but really it's a "database game". Imagine Her Story in an alternate history. You type codes into an odd machine to reveal snippets from books or journals. You're here to find a particular book. But the texts you discover are mostly the jumbled notes from previous users of the machine. Sounds intriguing, and many scribbles display a great range of writing styles. But I found slowly constructing my understanding of the plot and its many characters more cumbersome than rewarding. Putting its cryptic story together felt like building a cathedral out of SQL.

Some basics. You're Abbi, and you're stuck in a dank cellar with the strange machine. A voice comes over the radio, a bloke called Liam, who asks you to start toying with the levers and dials on this weird old codebreaker.

A machine with a large circular screen sits in a cellar, as a voice over the radio says "Tell me what you can see." — I don't know why I'm here either, don't

03 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Peak

Three game devs climb a mountain - part 7

Ain't no mountain tall enough (except this one)

I wait around at the bottom of a tree for Bennett Foddy to scramble up the bark, desperately looking over my shoulder for undead threats. I would like the game designer and noted moral philosopher to climb quickly and offer me a hand from the platform above. But he has circled back to a question I asked some time ago about resource management.

"For Baby Steps," he says, climbing painfully slow, "at some point we must have decided we didn't want resource use, but I don't know why. I think partly it's because we got so allergic to implementing UI... and that makes it really hard to have resources."

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Bennett climbs a tree as Holly's ghost watches on. — Okay, no, yes, of course, but also: climb faster please.

Bennett runs out of stamina and falls from the tree. He is lightly hurt. I hear zombie noises nearby. I put down the heavy, unconscious body of Emeric Thoa for a moment (I'm sure he'll be okay) and try to climb the tree myself.

Beneath me Foddy continues to talk about user interfaces and how they can get in the

02 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Hey! Listen! Here's why games use 'nag lines'

Sick of characters pestering you to "go this way"? This is why it happens

A few months ago Metroid Prime 4 was shown to press, and caused a small, localised stink in the chattosphere. We don't care much about Nintendo games at Jank, and I have no emotional stake in Metroid (Samus is the Ninty equivalent of John Halo - an extremely boring person vacuum-packed in fancy metal) but I do enjoy divining the stinklines that emanated from the first-person shoot 'n' splore, and the complaints by folks who got hands-on time with it.

The odour was familiar: a sidekick character would verbally needle you about performing the next correct action. "Samus, there's something interesting over there," a sidekick called Myles will say if the player strays too far in one direction. "Are you sure we don't need to use that?" Somebody in the resulting shiteswirl of social media discourse called this a "nag line". A succinct moniker for a trend that has existed in games for a long time without being given a name.

Nag lines are common enough, you'll know one when you hear it. Spend ten seconds inspecting a cool-looking prop while an NPC waits by a door, and they might say: "This way, McBloke, we've got a war to win!

02 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Peak

Three game devs climb a mountain - part 6

Cannon Foddy

"This is a thing that roguelikes and climbing games have together," says Bennett Foddy, completely unfazed by how close to death we are. "Which is that you carry the things that go badly for you. You carry them forward into your run, right?

"There's that thing that roguelike designers talk about. About how a roguelike can be 'flexible' or 'inflexible'. If it's flexible, it means that you can always turn it around to your favor and do your preferred strategy. And if it's inflexible, you have to roll with whatever happens in the randomness. And this one feels like we have to go with whatever happens, right? But I think that's maybe typical of climbing games."

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What has happened is that we are all exhausted, poisoned, starving, and injured. I don't know how "flexible" or "inflexible" the others feel, but I do not feel particularly well-treated by the game's dice rolls. Holly stops us on the next ridge.

"I have an item," she says. "I don't quite know what it does. It's called Pandora's lunchbox."

There is a ripple of sound