Graham Smith

19 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. What's the point of a lie-in when your bed is on the ground? I am, as this post is published, waking up - if indeed I slept at all - at a campsite, where I have been experiencing all the discomforts of the outdoors with a large contingent of children and animals. For that reason, I'm going to keep things brief this week, and hope that you enjoy your links from a comfier bed than my own.

Videogame studios aren't monoliths, writes Hayes Madsen, responding to an article that tried to draft fantasy developers for Microsoft IP from the burning remnants of last week's layoffs and divestments.

Xbox's franchise-first approach is bad for a number of reasons, but this kind of coverage is endemic of a major problem that has plagued games media for years, even decades - the idea that studios are monoliths. Studios make games, not the hundreds of people that make up a studio. I'm certainly not going to claim I haven't been guilty of the same thing in the past, but we need to do better.

I hadn't even heard of this game, but Lewis Gordon

17 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Play them for me, for I cannot

Nothing makes me feel quite so motivated as a camping trip, and not in a good way. It's like when you get to the end of a long holiday and right before you're due to return to work, you feel this sudden burst of inspiration to do all the things you soon won't be able to. I could have started a running habit or become the sort of person who gets up at 6am and meditates, but alas, I'm going camping this weekend. I could have played all these new videogames, but alas, I'm going camping this weekend.

Here's what you could be playing. Tell us what you are playing in the comments below.

The Mermaid Mask

Sally stands with her hands on her hips. "I keep staring into it like I'm going to see something... but it really does seem to be empty," she says.

The latest game in the Detective Grimoire series, and another standalone mystery to solve. This one is a locked room murder, and unlike its predecessor, every clue is a 3D object you can rotate and explore in search of secrets. It's also fully voiced and wonderfully animated, if the trailers are any indication. I need to make time to play this.

Denshattack!

A train rockets down a city street towards a femme mech.

Jet Set Radio if instead of a skateboard you were flipping and grinding as

12 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. Wall Week has ended, bringing to a close what began as a dumb joke and then wandered, article by article, into something surprisingly sincere. I feel that this is very Jank, as much as anything can be said to be "very Jank" when this website has existed for only six months. Thanks to all who signed up to support what we're building here. Now let's find some other good writing from across the rest of the internet.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced released this past week. For PC Gamer, Morgan Park played both it and the original back-to-back to produce a review that digs into the granular differences between them, and the question marks over remaking a game that's not that old and holds up quite well.

Ubisoft spent a generation transforming Assassin's Creed from a stealth-action power fantasy into a loot-driven RPG with spammy combat, and only now is it trying to make amends. Resynced feels like Ubisoft teaching itself how to make a proper Assassin's Creed again, and graded on that curve, it's quite good.

For Unwinnable, Jay Castello looks back at ten years

10 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

This post is free

Wall Week, our weeklong celebration of putting up our paywall, is nearing its end. As Brendy explained, many posts will remain outside that paywall each week, including weekly regulars like this one, and including your ability to comment on those articles. We made the decision early on to make commenting free because we want Jank to feel like a community; a cool place to hang out and chat, even if you don't have the money to hand over when Brendy tries a shakedown.

So come in, pull up a chair. Tell us what you're going to be playing this weekend.

Moonlight Peaks

"I do very much enjoy getting a sense of what it is like to engage in these odd customs of your kind," says Death, to a vampire.

Ever since I completed Pokémon Pokopia, I've been looking for a new game to give me errands to do. Moonlight Peaks looks like it could be that game, as a supernatural life sim in which you play as a vampire, befriend the local witches and mermaids, and spend your time potion-making and, of course, growing crops and fishing.

Echoes Of Aincrad

Anime heroes brandish a glowing sword and look up and off screen.

It's been a surprise to me that there aren't more isekai videogames, given the genre's ubiquity and popularity in anime. It's especially odd given how many isekai anime are

10 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith Wall Week

Anatomy of a wall

Some kids learn piano or dance. I learned how to keep render speeds low for Half-Life geometry

This is Wall Week, but there are no walls here. What you see in the screenshot above is not a wall, but a brush. A brush is a simple geometric shape rendered within Half-Life's Quake-derived GoldSrc engine. This particular brush is constructed within the Valve's mapmaking tool and consists of six faces, their corners defined by vertices. When run through the bsp compilation process, all faces not visible within the vacuum-sealed innerspace of your level are marked so as not to be rendered, and the remainder will rendered in-game as triangular polygons. If you look at the image and see a wall, then it is only an illusion.

Why is any of this important? It's not, really, in 2026, but I spent a thousand hours learning how to make Half-Life maps when I was a teenager and 25 years later I'm still mentally trying to keep the r_speeds down.

"R_speed" stands for "render speed", the speed at which the GoldSrc engine is able to draw whatever is currently on screen. It's a console command you can turn on in any Half-Life level to cause a waterfall of stats to trickle down the console log like you just enabled the Matrix.

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09 Jul 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Wall Week

The 10 best walls in PC games

Wall, wall, wall, look what we have here

Good walls make for good videogames, as Robert Frost probably wrote. That's why we wanted to celebrate these load-bearing pillars of the medium. They are the textures that engulf us, the boundaries that restrain us, the low cover that protects us, and the canvases awaiting messages daubed in blood or ink to entertain us. They are the ironically overlooked line-of-sight breakers that form the backbone of almost every game you've ever played.

From first-person shooters to collaborative adventures to ancient puzzle games, these are the best walls in PC games.

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05 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. It was a little quiet on Jank this week. Is this acceptable? Not to me, and I think you should be ruder to us in the comments so we don't let it happen again. In the meantime, here are some fine words about videogames (and Jackass) to see you through Sunday morning.

The best cinema-going experience I've had in the last ten years was seeing Jackass Forever, because nothing unites an audience like a funny and painful stunt. I used to look down upon the show, even as I watched it, but some mixture of audience nostalgia and good personal branding by the likes of Steve-O have changed its place within culture in the years since. For Aftermath, Joshua Rivera writes about exactly that, and how it "transformed from idiotic nuisance to one of the most endearing symbols of male friendship in pop culture", culminating in the new and final movie, Jackass: Best And Last.

Writing too much about Jackass is its own kind of stunt; the word count creeps up and so does the likelihood you've embarrassed yourself somehow, like you've shit your pants in word form. It is silly

03 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Play a game, while they last

The Steam summer sale continues, which means there's still a relative paucity of new game releases. There's nothing inherent in this weekly feature that requires the three games I pick to be new, but still I have rummaged around behind the sofa to pick three relatively recent games that seem worth your time.

As always, tell us what you are playing in the comments below.

A 2D platformer pixel art world. It is dark and has strange mushrooms. "Get away!" is written in the middle of the screen.

Casualties: Unknown demo

This is a demo I've had open in a browser tab since its release back in April. Delve into caves on alien planets in search of lost cargo, and deal with the strange, hostile environments you find. I'm most interested in this because it has "simulated limb and cardiovascular systems" that require you to fight infections and apply bandages to body parts in order to survive injury. I love a granular wounding system.

Some sort of plant guy is using abilities in third-person on a sandy planet against distant purple enemies.

Voidling Bound

A "creature collector", but far from a Pokémonlike. This looks like a third-person Risk Of Rain 'em up, in which you find and hatch alien creatures, cross-breed and evolve them with Spore-style body-part combinations, and then directly control one of your choice in wave-based combat. That combat is