Graham Smith

06 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

WYSPTW or wapwapwapwap for short

Videogames are intensifying! The first week of March has delivered more games I want to play than any other so far this year, and I haven't finished with all the Next Fest demos I want to play yet. Please, please slow down, we are but three sickly men with a small blog.

Here are just some of the games you should be playing this weekend, but remember to tell us all the other games you are playing in the comments below.

A crowded pier dense with shops, a bar, a ship, and dozens of people, rendered in a colourful orthographic style. — Oh, it's a fucking wonderland, is it? Delightful as shit, are we?

Lost And Found Co.

I played the demo of Lost And Found Co. several years ago and had checked in on it intermittently since. Its release this week was still a total surprise. This is a Where's Wally-style hidden object adventure that excites me, mainly, for the warmth and detail of its art style. Sooner or later I'll be queuing up some podcasts and spending hours finding miscellany in its Hergécore dioramas.

Two adventurers stand by a chest. "Not a mimic", reads a sign above it. — This isn't by one of the original Disco Elysium developers, mercifully.

Esoteric Ebb

What if you took many of the RPG systems and writerly flourishes of Disco Elysium and applied them back towards a more

06 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Jank business

We now have a dark mode

You asked and we delivered

We didn't know what the response would be when we launched Jank, except for one undoubtable fact: people were going to ask for a dark mode. Sure enough, you did, and so now we have one. Head down to the footer and you'll find a toggle to travel into what I am affectionately calling the After Eight zone.

Or perhaps you don't have to. The site should respect whatever dark mode setting you already have set within your browser, so it may well already be dark without you needing to press the switch. Either way, you can select whichever you prefer and the site will remember between sessions.

Oh! Since you clicked through to the full post, you don't even have to scroll down to the footer. You can just click the button here. Don't tell the others:

🌙 ☀️

If you have any feedback on how dark mode looks, please let us know in the comments. I prefer my sites to be bright like lightly spoiled snow, so I may not know precisely what you desire from the dark web. Is it contrasty enough? Does our reddish-orange accent colour work on a darker background better than I fear? You be the

04 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Questions

What game most disappointed you?

Sometimes I think I'd prefer if games never came out

My son is really pumped about Pokémon Pokopia (out this Thursday) and Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream (out next month), so much so that he recently told me he wasn't watching videos about either in case they made him less excited. He doesn't want to risk losing the hype. He's nine years old and already wise enough to know that sometimes YouTube videos lie to him or use misleading titles, but I really think if I do my job he'll be yelling at journalists for giving low scores to games he hasn't played by the time he's a teenager. The cycle must continue.

We're not there yet. Pokémon Pokopia reviews dropped earlier this week and so I got to tell him that journalists seem to love it. IGN's Rebekah Valentine gave it 9/10 and it's currently the highest rated Pokémon game on Metacritic. Still, he's worried about being disappointed. What if he plays it and doesn't like it, he asked, on the walk to school. So I got to impart some important fatherly wisdom. I got to tell him about Peter Molyneux.

I've never been as excited for any game was I was for Black & White. I had

02 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Deadline Delivery and Deep Snow Delivery are the past and present of videogames

But both of them are its future

I initially dismissed Deadline Delivery as a mere trifle. It is a time attack driving game in which you, a monkey, must deliver three parcels before a timer runs out. You must therefore make those deliveries without slowing down, throwing the parcels from your vehicle within designated glowing circles. If the timer does run out, your truck explodes, and the monkey goes spinning through the air. You'll need to repeat and refine each short track to earn the medals that unlock future tracks, but this is no chore. Restarts are instant and it feels great to experimentally boost and power-slides until you discover the perfect racing line to take you over ramps and around oncoming traffic and shave seconds off your time.

Crazy Taxi is an obvious reference point, but Deadline Delivery also reminds me of an earlier period in PC gaming, when these kinds of light and (whisper it) casual games seemed like an integral part of the nascent indie game scene. Flashbang Studios were the masters of this stuff, I think, with games like Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, Jetpack Brontosaurus, Minotaur China Shop and Time Donkey. (I swear I'm not making these up.) There was always an animal, always

01 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I have been bone tired all week in a way that I couldn't shake until Friday morning, when I employed the best remedy for such a feeling: I got a haircut. Properly restored, I've been on top of everything ever since. Let's celebrate with some words worth reading this Sunday morning.

I've complained many times that business analysis, or some amateur impression of it, too often replaces arts and culture conversations around videogames among both journalists and the game-playing public. Mikhail Klimentov therefore gets the top spot this week for writing a thing I already agree with on that theme. Not everything is Concord:

A year and a half after its collapse, the prominence of Concord as a cautionary example represents a retreat from talking about games in favor of talking about business and marketing — a sort of rot in the culture. Has a developer successfully sold me on XYZ new game? Did the trailer rollout make sense? What’s the view count on somesuch marketing material? And how will all this redound on player counts and units moved? These aren’t my favorite subjects, and I look a bit askance at people who really care about

27 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

Last week I suggested that you might play the new Styx game, Blades Of Greed. This week, Styx publisher Nacon declared bankruptcy. I guess you didn't listen to me and now you see what happens. Let's try it again.

Here's three games you could be playing this weekend. Let us know what game you're playing instead in the comments.

Harry Kim is asking for your orders, Captain, in a text prompt next to a picture of the USS Voyager. But look, it's not actually Harry Kim. Harry Kim was sucked into space and killed in season two and we replaced him with a different Harry from an alternate universe. Nobody talks about it but our Harry Kim is dead! Don't let Janeway cover up anymore dea-- — I can't explain right now, but that's not the real Harry Kim.

Star Trek: Voyager - Across The Unknown

This survival strategy game is supposedly a "faithful recreation" of the TV series, a very dumb show that I love very much. Presumably this means that the characters aboard the ship die constantly but then are miraculously restored within 44 minutes, their traumatic experiences never to be mentioned again. In fact, I'd be much more inclined to play it if it was more knockabout toybox than Frostpunk misery sim. Here's hoping.

Some magic guys blast fire at an enemy next to a bunch of cornfields and grass. — The use of fire in these fields is deeply irresponsible.

Towerborne

Stoic, makers of The Banner Saga trilogy, return with a new game with similarly gorgeous character designs. There's no turn-based thinkery here, however. This is a co-op action-RPG about biffing big monsters with brawler-style combos. A bit Dragon's Crown? A

22 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading.

Good morning, videogames. As you read this, I pray that I am having an actual lie-in. I must recuperate after spending all of Saturday tired and wounded, after having spent all of Friday evening fighting off the brigand Edwin from aging ad-funded webzone RPS. After several hours of struggle, he fled back into the underbrush, his devious mission unfulfilled, and his current whereabouts are unknown. I suspect we shall see him and his rotten ilk again. For now, at least, I retain the strength necessary to share some articles, videos and podcasts worth consuming from across the past week.

Sony closed down Bluepoint Games, the studio best known for remaking Demon's Souls, without them having released a new game under Sony's ownership. Nathan Brown tackled this with customary scorn in his Hit Points newsletter this week.

With new blockbusters taking longer and costing more than ever to make, and nostalgia never a more powerful currency, shuttering a proven specialist in remakes and remasters is frankly insane. Casting out a team of such deep technical expertise and, more crucially, such broad institutional knowledge — Bluepoint doesn’t just know its own tools and technology, but also those of the studios whose games

21 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

Vholume demands to be played with your entire body

First-person parkour on the concrete's edge.

After an hour in Vholume, my neck aches and my legs are shaking. It's because I've been tensed like a coiled spring for the duration, racing in a first-person parkour time trial where a single mistake might cause me to fall to my death or worse, fail to break my personal best.

"First-person parkour" might bring to mind Mirror's Edge, and sure enough Vholume has the wall-running and bum-slides to go split-toe to split-toe with that cult classic. But Vholume is the work of Léonard Lemaitre (among others), one of the brothers responsible for Jank favourites Babbdi and Straftat. There's no gleaming city of glass here, only the by-now trademark brutalist architecture and water-damaged concrete that makes you feel like you're racing through an empty server of some forgotten Half-Life mod.

Vholume's current free beta contains just two tracks, and it's the basic hub world that has obsessed me for most of the past week. It's a simple circuit under grey skies, with an abyssal drop which threatens to swallow you from below. You will race around it a few times and pretty quickly achieve a time quick enough to grant you a bronze medal, at which point you will