Graham Smith - Jank (Page 7)

24 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The device I want Valve to make

What if the Steam Deck was smaller and less powerful?

If you want a more powerful Steam Deck designed solely for playing games on your television, good news. On Monday, Valve revealed prices for the Steam Machine, a companion cube designed to bring PC gaming into your living room. All of the reviews pretty much agree: they're cool, small, quiet machines that offer a gateway to the platform, but feel too expensive because everything is too expensive now.

That's great and I've added my name to the waiting list. Now Valve should make what I really want: a less powerful Steam Deck that's still handheld but half the size.

I've owned a Steam Deck since launch and I like it a lot. I don't take for granted how wonderful it is to be able to play PC games on the go - or in my case, while lying in bed or on the couch - and it's great that it's powerful enough to play a surprising number of the games on Steam. I could run Elden Ring on that thing, or Resident Evil Requiem, or with the right settings even multiplayer shooters like Arc Raiders.

I could watch No Country For Old Men on

21 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. My kid has wanted to get into chess for a little while and I finally got round to setting him up on Chess.com. He played some challenges and some matches and, in the afternoon, came to me triumphant. "I am getting good at chess," he said, clearly proud. "That's great," I said, "I hope you are having fun." Later that evening, right before bed, he urged me to get my own Chess.com account so we could play together. I beat him three times in a row and he went to bed sad and quiet. Will he ever play chess again? Will I ever stop feeling guilty? It's clear to me that games were a mistake, but here are some links to words, videos and podcasts about them.

A picture went around the internet last week of the actor Jack Quaid wearing a mocap suit and wrapped in PVC piping, seemingly for his role as the gelatinous cube in the upcoming God Of War: Laufey. For Kotaku, Rebekah Valentine spoke to animators, actors, and a mocap technician to puzzle out the benefits of recording motion capture for a cube.

“There’s definitely a case

19 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Aside from lots of Next Fest demos

This has been another relatively quiet week for game releases, because what you're supposed to be playing are the demos released as part of Next Fest. I'd personally recommend Blood Dungeon. If you once had a traumatic experience with a coverdisc and now the idea of a demo triggers a panic attack, fret not: I've still pulled out three newly released games you could play instead.

Tell us what you are playing in the comments, whether it's a demo or not.

The Adventures Of Elliot: The Millennium Tales

The demo of Elliot released several weeks ago and its combat and art style won me over, even if its story and characters seemed gratingly anaemic. That seems to be the broad consensus from reviewers now the full adventure/tale is available. This is a Zelda-style action-RPG with real-time combat rendered in Square Enix's 2D-HD style, and seems to promise a good time as long as you're happy to turn your brain (and maybe ears) off.

City Car Driving 2.0

I played a lot of the original City Car Driving and this sequel offers the same straight-faced simulation of traffic

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