Graham Smith

04 Sep 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

And what we're playing

September always bring an avalanche of game releases, but I'm told that this September is even more of a whiteout than normal. Honestly? You wouldn't know it to look at the PC release calendar, where the month looks exactly as blizzardy as it always does, and pretty much as snow-packed as every other month. I think I maybe just care about different games.

Here are three of this month's releases that you could be playing this weekend. Tell us what you are playing in the comments.

Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault

Moonlighter has a wonderfully straightforward premise: go dungeon delving for treasure at night, then sell that treasure in your shop during the day. It was partly responsible for popularising what's become a genre, and this sequel with fully 3D environments has now hit 1.0 after a little less than a year in Early Access. I hate the subtitle, but don't hold that against it.

[Disclosure from Brendy: I worked on this game's story in its earliest stages - Graham forgot to say. But as far as I can tell they didn't use a damned word! So if there are zero jokes

03 Sep 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

These folks put Spelunky (1) in Spelunky (2) so you can Spelunky (1) while you Spelunky (2)

HDMod sends you back to the worlds of the original Spelunky with all the polish of the sequel

Spelunky 1 is the best game ever made. I prefer its pacing, difficulty, and variety to its sequel. And yet if I was to recommend one of these games to a new player, I would find it difficult to advocate for the original. Spelunky 2, released eight years later (and twelve years after the original freeware version), has better player movement, better art, and a dozen small design changes that make it a smoother experience. Spelunky 1 is the better game - the best game! - but it feels old by comparison.

Enter the creators of the HDMod for Spelunky 2, which recreates the original Spelunky's world generation, enemies, characters and items within the sequel. So now I can play Spelunky 1 inside Spelunky 2 and experience the best of both.

"Spelunky 2 feels like an improvement in almost every aspect," says Super Ninja Fat (SNF), one of the mod's creators, speaking to me over email. "The engine alone made many fixes, mechanic improvements and quality of life changes over the original. However, many fans like myself miss the first game's pacing and content distribution."

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30 Aug 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. Jonty and I have both been away this past week on separate work trips, leaving Brendy to operate the cranks, winches and pulleys of Jank alone. And didn't he do well? Jonty handled the summary in yesterday's Jank Mail, so I'll just add my thanks to Brendy's newborn for leaving his father with just enough mental capacity to play a multiplayer game. Astonishing. Let's round up some games writing from across the past week.

I remember when the "gamer bill of rights" was a serious proposition from a handful of developers and digital storefronts. Mothership asked a group of people to pitch ideas for what such a document might contain, tongue closer to cheek.

The right not to play a game

Just because "everyone" loves a game or it wins a bunch of awards or someone tells you that you "have" to play it does not mean you do in fact have to play it. You are no less of a "real gamer" just because you have not played a certain game. There are thousands of games that have been released over decades on a variety of platforms, which come with many

28 Aug 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

And what we are playing

Gamescom took place this week, but that didn't stop people releasing new game after new game. I could have packed this list with triple the usual number, but I am but one frail and achy person, and so you get just three.

You can correct this failing yourself by letting us know what you're playing this weekend in the comments.

Blood Dungeon

A big wyrm, some satyrs, and a lil guy clinging to a wall as he shoots the wyrm.

I wrote about Blood Dungeon, the autoshooter from the maker of Nidhogg, back when the demo came out. I wrote about its manic beauty and its significance as a work of art by a creator who has refined their distinctive voice over decades of releases. I did not mention that the player is pooped out of a butt in the ceiling every time they return to the hub world. Now I have.

Folk Emerging

A close view of some hexy settlements and dense UI amid a sandy environment.

It's been a long while since I've fallen for a 4X game, and I suspect something smaller and more focussed might be my route back into the genre. Folk Emerging could be it. It's about leading nomadic tribes through the Stone Age, in which you must juggle family politics and deal with brand new inventions like subsistence farming and

23 Aug 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. Except it's not morning. I have finally failed to deliver this article on time, as I'm away from home at the moment doing other things. Forgive me. We'll add an extra tier to our new subscriber goals at which I will be flogged. In the meantime, a collection of links awaits you below.

The second collection of Metal Gear Solid re-releases is arriving next week, and Polygon's Giovanni Colantonio revisited the fourth game in the series to talk about what's aged well, and less well.

But the poorly aged stealth action is far from the most shocking thing about Metal Gear Solid 4. Instead, it’s how direct Kojima is about tackling political issues without mincing a single word.

I love brush-based level design. Brendon Chung loves it too, and his opinion matters more as the maker of 30 Flights Of Loving, Quadrilateral Cowboy and Skin Deep.

It’s intentionally and specifically not a general-purpose tool designed to do anything – and I think that’s great. It’s built from the ground up to focus on authoring geometry for 3D game levels, allow you to make it as easily

21 Aug 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

And what we are

What a week it's been. You must be eight or nine months into the school summer holidays by now? Twelve or thirteen heatwaves, effectively one never-ending nightmare of sweaty necks and bleached grass? At least the weekend is here, when you get to put down childish things (the arbitrary strictures of work) and instead commit yourself to the pursuit of being human via the medium of videogames.

I'll tell you what we're playing this weekend if you tell us yours.

An isometric perspective on an RTS base with a swarm of dinosaurs battling nearby.

Repterra

I grew up watching Saturday-morning cartoon Denver, the Last Dinosaur (he's my best friend and a whole lot more). But what if Denver wasn't the last dinosaur? What if there were, in fact, too many Denvers? This is the nightmare scenario posited by Repterra, a "base-building survival RTS" in which you can ultimately turn dinos into your best friend and a whole lot more, where "more" means using them as mounts in your forever-war against their kin.

A galley ship in port in a pixel art world of medieval buildings and trees and grass.

Hearth And Hamlet

Brendy Caldwell, Videogame Cop might have outlawed games that play themselves, but I'll continue to smuggle contraband incrementalism into the pages of Jank. Hearth And Hamlet promises "relaxing idle

19 Aug 2026 By Graham Smith Reviews

Sandustry review

A time sink that respects your time

I started Sandustry on a whim at 8:15pm on a Friday evening. I was still playing at 2am. I went to bed, woke up at 9am, and immediately started playing again. It's rare that a game gets its claws into me like this. It's even rarer that I feel good about it.

Sandustry, now in Early Access, is a factory builder with a great hook: every pixel is physically simulated. Think Noita, but instead of a deadly roguelike, you're laying down conveyor belts and sorters to gradually process all the natural resources of an alien world. Factorio but with gravity. Satisfactory but I'm satisfied.

I used to think I had a complicated relationship with 'busywork games', the kind that give you a todo list of simple (and sometimes prima facie tedious) tasks, and invite you to decide whether the experience is a flow or fugue state. I love some of those games (Pokémon Pokopia, Turnip Boy) and flee almost instantly from the seeming pointlessness of others. I now think my relationship is very simple: some todo lists feel worthwhile and others do not, and it's a matter of design as to which is which. In other words, it is the games that are good or bad, not me.

Sand and grey residue moved along a conveyor belt. — This factory was hell but I was proud of it anyway.

Too often factory builders feel like they're putting artificial obstacles in my path and daring me to work hard enough to render the inconveniences moot. That power curve can feel good, but more often than not it feels too much like the bad kind of wasting time. I don't want to cup water for ten hours to earn a bucket.

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16 Aug 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. I fell hard for a new game on Friday night and I am eager to get back to playing it. Thankfully my links are already all picked out, neatly folded, and arranged in a row below. There are some good ones this week.

For Chisel, Mikhail Klimentov grapples with the thousands of hours he's spent playing Valorant, and paints an unflinchingly honest portrait that will be relatable to those who have ever obsessed over a multiplayer game.

I could feel myself reverting to boyhood, storming out of the proverbial playdate cursing my erstwhile friends after particularly infuriating games. I fell victim to those school-age anxieties – Do these guys even like me? – coming out the back of marathon double-digit-hour gaming sessions, at the end of which everyone is more or less nonverbal. I could feel my neural pathways atrophying with every inside joke repeated unthinkingly, landing to lesser and lesser effect as the night wore on. I grew hypersensitive to small and more than likely imagined changes in social gravity: who’s up, who’s down, who’s spending less time online, who can get people to come online just by getting into the