Graham Smith

20 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

I took the Steam Deck with me when travelling last weekend, and instead of leaving it in my suitcase untouched in favour of reading books, as per usual, I spent much of my downtime playing tactical deckbuilder StarVaders. This is because I know I need to write posts for Jank and therefore must be playing games in every spare moment. Cheerfully, it's also because I think you'd appreciate the articles even if they're about games outside the current release cycle. This is highly motivating, so thanks.

On the other hand, you're making me less literate. Read on for some games you could be playing in lieu of reading books this weekend - and tell us what you are playing in the comments.

A character shoots a fireball from a plant at an enormous tree man surrounded by dazed tree children. — This certainly doesn't look like any Zelda dungeon I've ever seen.

Under The Island

I'm never too excited by the sight of another 2D Zelda-like, because the formula is simple enough that it often struggles to shine at lower levels of execution. Under The Island is threatening to overcome my skepticism with its trailers, which show an impressively diverse world and an emphasis upon the puzzle part of the formula over the combat.

Styx the goblin hides behind a box with a knife while a troll or something walks nearby. — This is pure bullshot, in

18 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith Reviews

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Stole Time review

Oh no! My time!

Early in Fantasy Life i, a character tells me that I stink. It's the stench of idleness, he says, and the only solution is to get a job. This happens after I've washed ashore on a beautiful tropical island where my first instinct is to enjoy the sunshine or, more prudently, find the means to urgently save the friends I last saw stranded at sea upon a sinking ship. Rescue can wait, apparently, because first I need to prove my worth by seeking out a career. "How are you going to help people without a job?" I am asked.

I started playing Fantasy Life i last year almost immediately after giving notice at my job of twelve years. "Friend," I wanted to say, "simply having a job doesn't keep the stink off."

Fantasy Life calls its 14 different careers "Lives" - no I will not write an entire essay about this - and the unifying fantasy offered by each one is that your work is a mutually beneficial transaction that helps everybody, makes the world a better place, and rewards you with both personal satisfaction and upward mobility. You perform this work for always-grateful townspeople around a colourful and familiar

15 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading.

Good morning, videogames. My father turns 80 years-old today, opening the brief four-month window in which he is precisely twice my age. If another 40-year-old wants to merge with me to also become an 80-year-old, we can then create the world's first 160-year-old. Otherwise we can just read (watch, and listen to) some fine words about videogames.

Game arts festivals are disappearing worldwide, typified by Freeplay, the oldest art games non-profit, which recently announced that they were a year away from closing down. Robert Yang wrote a blog post that gathers together the coverage and conversation that followed the Freeplay news, the reasons why events like these are struggling, and what organisers might do about it. I've worked on enough (commercial, mainstream) games events to know that it was a miracle that any of these things ever happened in the first place, where "it was a miracle" means "it was an act of enormous dedication by a village of talented, passionate, generous people who could have had an easier time doing literally anything else." Hey that's all miracles.

Mads call this "The $1000 Problem": the event size / budget that is both too big and too small. For example it might

13 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

My Retroid Pocket 6 arrived this week and I am immediately leaving on a family trip. Is this the perfect time to cosy down and play some retro classics? Oh friend. I didn't buy this thing to play games on it. I bought it so I could spend countless evenings tinkering with frontends, boxart, and metadata. Should I ever get the device set up just to my liking, it will be going straight in a drawer to be forgotten about. Fingers crossed everything is as fiddly and time-consuming as I think it should be, or I'm going to have to buy an AYN Thor as a second project.

You might be built different. You might want to actually boot up a game. Here's a few you could try - and tell us what you are playing in the comments.

A side-on cut-through of a museum, showing six rooms. — I'm already stealing lost cultural artifacts on my Retroid Pocket 6.

Relooted

Everyone who has watched Indiana Jones or played Tomb Raider has had the idea: what if instead of stealing from foreign historical sites, we were taking back plundered artifacts from museums and repatriating them to their origins? Relooted is exactly that: a 3D sidescroller from a South African developer

10 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

I wish videogame culture would take more cues from readers

It's time to ditch the release cycle and select what we play via more interesting constraints.

The book readers have it figured out. I listen to book podcasts and follow a lot of (I hate this word) bookstagrammers, and the turnover of a new year is the best time to do either of those things. This is because they're all reviewing their reading goals for the year that was and the year to come. Did they finish the number of classics they'd hoped? Did they finish the bibliography of Ballard novels? And will next year be the year they really commit to #JanuaryInJapan, when all over the world people dedicate themselves to reading translated fiction from the country?

I wish we did more of the same in videogames. Our equivalent discourse gets as far as ranking the best games of the year that was, and then immediately moves on to anticipating the next year's new releases, pre-emptively stuffing our backlogs with games we'll rue not having had the time to play when the next year draws to a close. Couldn't we set ourselves some more interesting constraints?

The problem - I don't think I'm blowing anyone's mind here - is in part that videogames culture is so commercial. Publishers make money by selling you something new,

08 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading.

Good morning, videogames. Stretch at the knees, spread your toes, and feel the brushed cotton ensconcing you like a big toasty cinnamon bun... Uh oh. Gotta read some good reads from across the week.

Obsidian released three games last year - an absurd number from a single studio in the modern era. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier visited the studio in the aftermath as it attempts to change its development processes to make games more quickly and cheaply.

Last year the developer released three games—a rare and impressive achievement for a studio of its size—but two of them failed to meet sales forecasts set by Obsidian’s parent company, Microsoft Corp. “They’re not disasters,” Urquhart says. “I’m not going to say this was a kick in the teeth. It was more like: ‘That sucks. What are we learning?’”

Stardew Valley is ten years old. IGN's Rebekah Valentine spoke to developer ConcernedApe about the game's success and his future.

So I asked you about big positive moments in the last 10 years. What about challenging times? Is there any moment in the last 10 years of Stardew that you recall as being exceptionally difficult or frustrating?

Barone: I think

06 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

Another weekend? So soon? I am not at all prepared for this collision with two days of supposed non-work, but I hope that you are making merry, putting your feet up, and stuffing your gullet with salty, crunchy videogames.

Here what you should or could be playing. Tell us what you actually are playing in the comments.

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined

I am not an RPG guy, but oh how I dream of being. Alas, I tried playing the Dragon Quest VII Reimagined demo and fell asleep on the couch within an hour. I'm like yer da putting the snooker or bowls on TV on a Sunday - I see the colour green and I'm out. If you've greater fortitude than I, this seems like a great modernisation of one of the genre's classics, with lots of fast-forward and automation options to make the combat more fun (and an anthology structure to make the 85-hour runtime less intimidating).

A spaceship with a lot of complicated parts, viewed from above, possibly on fire. — This is fine.

05 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

I can't stop playing KOLYDR

A new classic from the master craftsman of browser games.

I can't describe KOLYDR more succinctly than it describes itself, as a game in which "you clear out reds by crashing into blues until a green appears." It's a tiny, single screen PICO-8 game you can play in your browser right now. What makes me keep playing is that it's a game of constant risk and reward, one where nearly every moment is a gamble and every death was preventable if only I hadn't pushed my luck.

This is also what makes me yowl in anguish every time I die.

Here's the longer explanation of how KOLYDR works: you move a small craft (using arrow keys, ESDF or gamepad) around a square arena. Blue squares appear which explode when touched, and the explosions destroy red squares, which are otherwise gradually filling the arena. Destroyed red squares drop gold which can be collected and are worth 100 points. After a short while, green squares will begin to appear which allow you to end your run and bank your score.

Naturally, you want your score to be as high as possible, so you don't leave when a green exit first appears. Instead, you keep going, as reds appear at random throughout the

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