Graham Smith - Jank (Page 4)

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

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,