Graham Smith - Jank (Page 3)

17 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

Blood Dungeon is the future games deserve

The demo is the best freeware game from 2010 you've ever played

Blood Dungeon is the kind of game that makes me want to simply repeat "BLOOD DUNGEON! BLOOD DUNGEON! BLOOD DUNGEON!" for 300 words and call this post done. It's the kind of game that felt like the future of the art circa 2010: a work with, regardless of team size, a clear authorial voice; with simple pixel art which seems to fizz; with ultraviolence and verve and arcade flair; with a sense of humour and an economy of design.

None of these things are a surprise. Blood Dungeon is the work of (among others) Mark Essen, the creator of Nidhogg, which I first played in 2010. His work felt like the future of the art then and it still does now.

For all Blood Dungeon feels like the product of a simpler era of freeware game design, it's also tied to indie gaming's most modern expression: the autoshooter. Like Vampire Survivors, your challenge here is to avoid enemies and kite them around while your weapons carry out their task automatically. This is married to a platformer in which you stick to every surface, letting you clamber up walls, hang from ceilings, and balance along tightropes with ease.

16 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

The Witch's Bakery demo got me out of a gaming slump

The demo is available now ahead of release in August

I've been feeling sort of listless lately. I want to be deeply engrossed in something and I'm currently not. My attempts to burrow inside a new game have been rebuffed several times in a row, and by the fourth or fifth time I abandon a new game within the first 30 minutes, I start to lose the will to try another. Book lovers talk a lot about being in a "reading slump", a minor malady that's often resolved by reading something short or re-reading an old favourite. When in a gaming slump, I often do the opposite, seeking out larger and more labyrinthine games as my desperation for absorption grows. This is a mistake.

The Witch's Bakery arrived at just the right moment. The demo, available in the ongoing Steam Next Fest, does not require any burrowing on the part of the player. Its delights are on the surface.

I mean, just look at it. Looking at it is most of the pleasure.

Lunne is a witch who has moved to Paris to open a bakery with her magical associate, a talking cat named Orio. You control her days and nights: serving customers their desired

14 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. The World Cup is now underway, which means I can spend the next several days complaining that England's opening game is on at a comfortable 9pm BST while Scotland's opening game was on at 2am. Bloody typical, isn't it. No wonder I need a lie-in today, so let's quickly gather some articles about videogames worth reading.

I love Spore, a grand and ambitious everything-game that doesn't quite work, but which is fascinating to play and to read about. For Design Room, Jay Castello interviewed Will Wright and and seven other members of its development team to put together an oral history.

"He was like, I want to do a game about all the things that had to happen for humans to exist, improbability upon improbability upon improbability," says Trottier. "I want people to have an innate, marvelous sense of how amazing it is that we ever happened in the first place. And they'll do it by experiencing one failure after another after another."

For Manifesto Jam 2026, Mike Cook writes what a lot of people need to hear.

THE DREAM OF SELLING GAMES IS KILLING THE DREAM OF MAKING

12 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Tell us what you're playing below

After a week of respite, the machinegun of videogame releases has begun firing once more. In fact, it's been joined now by the handgun of demo releases, as June's Steam Next Fest grows nearer. You can expect some writing about our favourites in the days and weeks to come, but for now, here's a handful of full and finished games you could play this weekend.

Tell us what you coulda woulda shoulda been playing in the comments.

A lot of guys with swords run away from a flame-coloured ocean and through a passageway. — Is there 33 here? I'm not counting to find out.

33 Immortals

A co-op hack-and-slasher for 33 players - sort of. In reality, you can play solo or party up with four friends, and then you'll be matchmade with other people in their own parties for large-scale, MMO-style raids, in which you need to coordinate to take down God. Hades seems like an obvious point of comparison to the combat and loop here, but it's also from Thunder Lotus, the makers of Spiritfarer and Jotun.

A woman stands next to a rosebed in front of a thatched cottage, waterfall and trees in the distance. — We may come to regret replacing most of our food crops with roses.

Tales Of Seikyu

Not a part of the Tales Of series of JRPGs, but a

09 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

12 upcoming games that give me hope for the future

Triple-A showcases are the thief of joy, but luckily we secured joy to your belt with a wallet chain

Not-E3 and its exhausting cavalcade of marketing showcases has drawn to a close, leaving behind the hangover of disdain and regret I feel every year. Do I even like videogames anymore? Did I ever? How could anyone possibly appreciate this dour medium? Let me summarise the blockbuster games thus: Coca-Cola announced new Coke flavours for the Coke drinkers, Pepsi announced new Pepsi flavours for the Pepsi drinkers, and those of us in desperate need of a sip of water rasped for it all to end.

Do not, as I almost did, give up hope. The rains will come. In the meantime, I have harvested the morning dew and dug under the dry riverbeds. I have found water in the desert. Here are the only games from Not-E3 that were actually worth your time.

Carcass Clad

I love clunking machinery and a diegetic interface, and I love steering tanks through desolate landscapes. Carcass Clad is about both, as you and your co-op partners operate the cranks and levers of the Yksiö, your Soviet (or Soviet-inspired) tank which has the husks of (mutated?) livestock messily nailed to its armour. That this is also from Wrong Organ, the

07 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I am hosting a sleepover for three ten-year-olds and so there will be no lie-in for me today. As I write this now, on Saturday, it's not yet even clear whether there will be sleep for me. That doesn't mean we can't heroically gather some fine writing about videogames (and much more), though.

For PC Gamer, Rick Lane tells the story of the making of Unreal 2. I remember that it was initially enormously ambitious, but I did not know (or did not remember) that it effectively wanted to be Mass Effect.

Verdu wanted to create an all-new Unreal experience, one that leant harder into the cinematic sci-fi of the original. "I hatched a vision for a game that, rather than you just being constrained to one world, it would have this story device that allowed you to move between worlds, and that became a spaceship," he explains. "We were going to create a little simulation of a world on a ship, and it would have these characters that move around, that you have these interesting conversations with, and those characters were going to develop along with the story,

05 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Tell us what you're playing below

We have once again dragged our nets along the sea floor of videogames to trawl for new releases worth bringing back to port, but for once our catch is bordering on paltry. Perhaps the videogames were simply too small to be caught in our nets, or perhaps the industry's videogame farmers thought it unwise to release alongside the marketing bonanza of Summer Game Fest, which continues over the weekend.

In any case, there are still some interesting new games you could play. Tell us what you are playing in the comments.

Characters, that look like the guys from Peak, drive trucks around a warehouse covered in paint or slime. — Now you know what was at the top of that mountain.

Crashout Crew

The latest game from Aggro Crab, fresh from their success as the co-developers of Peak. Crashout Crew has a similar art style and focus on co-op slapstick, but here your and your buddies are fulfilling orders in a warehouse that's really just an escalating series of physics arenas. A little bit Peak, a little bit Overcooked.

A group of ghostly figures in fancy old fashioned clothes sit around a drawing room. — Guests 1-6.

The 7th Guest Remake

I never played The 7th Guest, but it was practically a permanent fixture for about a decade of PC gaming magazines. This remake uses volumetric filming techniques to produce

02 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

The adventures of hat guy and tutorial gal

The Adventures Of Elliot: The Millennium Tales seems initially bland, but its demo won me over

Some people's names can hold up to being put in the title of a videogame or movie, but I'm not sure "Elliot" is one of them. The protagonist of Square Enix's next HD-2D game is introduced by one NPC as a man of good character, although they "will admit he has his quirks." I assume that's a reference to Elliot's red hat, which seems to be the the only notable part of his personality.

The Adventures Of Elliot: The Millennium Tales might be as bland as its main character, but I think I'm fully onboard anyway after playing its demo.

Elliot is an adventurer in a fantasy world overrun by beastmen. The remaining human population are safe inside a medieval city's walls thanks to a magical shield maintained by the princess. Adventurers are those few who travel beyond the walls to explore and find supplies, and in Elliot's case to earn money he can use to care for the children in the orphanage in which he was raised. His name could have been called Hero McDogooder and the game name would have been better.

This has the same art style