Graham Smith - Jank (Page 5)

31 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Videogames' three art styles: pixel art, embroidery, and skeletons

As you read this, I am still on holiday where, baggage allowance permitting, I will be playing games on my Steam Deck. Which games, I have no idea. Thankfully I have prepared in advance and below you will find your usual collection of games you could be playing. Where would you be without me?

Tell us what you are playing in the comments below.

Scarlet Deer Inn

Three characters, each embroidered, in a painted 2D landscape of trees and grass. A ghost stands to the right of frame.

A side-scrolling medieval folk tale in which every frame of character animation was created via embroidery. I have no idea how this plays out in practice - Thank Goodness You're Here meets Pentiment? - but it looks beautiful and I'm keen to find out.

Hand Of Fate: Hordes

Hundreds of skeletons surround the player, who is firing lasers. Cards sit at the bottom of the screen.

Hand Of Fate was a beloved tactical deckbuilder that seemingly didn't perform well enough to support its developers, who effectively closed down after Hand Of Fate 2. Now a bunch of former staff have re-formed under a new studio to bring some of the series' crunchy deckbuilding into a bullet hell context. It's out in Early Access now.

Offbeat

A desk in a small room, with a pinboard on the wall, drawn in isometric pixel art.

Music is better than videogames, so here's a management tycoon game in which you construct your own recording studio, collect musical

26 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. I am having an actual, proper lie-in this Sunday for possibly the first time in years, since I have no family appointments to keep. I look forward to waking up thick-headed, groggy and ill, like every 40-something when they get slightly more sleep than usual. Perhaps I can soothe my aching head with some good words about videogames.

Over at Aftermath, Luke Plunkett wrote about Soren Johnson's 4X game Old World, to explain what it gets right in its attempts to design around issues with the Civilization series.

I think a focused 4X game is a good 4X game. Why? By limiting its representation of history to a single era, Old World is able to invest in much more detailed and interesting diversions within that period than Civ has ever been able to manage. Most important of these is a dynasty and relationship system lifted straight from Crusader Kings, where every faction is made up of families and clans, and every major individual within them is represented by personality traits and skills, and the relationships they develop as a result.

Joshua Rivera reviewed Splatoon Raiders for The Guardian and liked it a lot

24 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Three games with colours

I survived my camping adventure and am now barrelling head first into the school summer holidays, with flights booked to visit family next week. Before that happens I've got one weekend spare to queue up some Jank articles and play some videogames. Let's decide what I should play.

You can help. Tell us what you're playing in the comments down below.

MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls

Captain America bishes Danger with his shield against the backdrop of a cinema marquee.

I'm not really into fighting games or Marvel, but a lack of genre interest has never stopped me playing an Arc Systems Works game in the past. They have tremendous artists and animators, and bringing all their talent with colour and keyframes from their Guilty Gear series works to breathe new life into characters made mundane by the movies. Fighting Souls doesn't launch until early August, but it's in open beta now.

Go-Go Town!

Two cute characters fish in a pond surrounded by grass and palm trees.

A cute, toy town Animal Crossing-like in which you gradually bring a town to life by tidying, fishing and running errands for the locals. It differs from most of its inspirations in two ways: its set in a more bustling urban environment rather than a pastoral village, and it eventually leads you towards

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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This article is part of Wall Week, a celebration in honour of our paywall going up.

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