Jon Hicks

This week on Jank, Graham found that The Witch’s Bakery offered nothing new and yet everything he needed, and that Blood Dungeon was a welcome addition to his sixteen-year history of Messhof games. Brendy crashed a Google plane into Google’s HQ and he’d do it again, you hear? He also brought back Living in Sim with a look at The Data Center, which is as soothing a distraction as you’d expect but does not reckon with the AI usage it both enacts and implies. I played Bad Magpie and found that it advances the bad-bird canon.

This week not on Jank the big news is, once again, Xbox fucked it. Widely-reported and conspicuously not officially-commented-upon stories reported that Double Fine, Compulsion Games and Ninja Theory are all on the chopping block, as part of a widespread bloodletting which was foreshadowed by the announcement of the Great Reset and the departure of the boss of Xbox Game Studios, who presumably peaced out rather than spend months reciting bullet points in severance meetings. This comes a mere week after a lavish fan hoedown which included a reveal of Ninja Theory’s new game,

There was no Jank Mail last week, for which I apologise: I was in LA for the annual trailer spectacular once called E3, and now being consumed by Geoff Keighley’s glossy rival Summer Game Fest, which incorporates both his own showcase and the adjoining ones that he freely attaches the brand to. I learned many things, and one of them was that it’s not possible for me to attend everything and write any meaningful digest of the contents, so I’m going to bless you with a jumbo roundup today. 

Let’s start with what Jank did. Brendy found a game that lets you kick orcs off a cliff and it only costs £7 (total, not per orc). He also sort of reviewed Subnautica 2 by asking game developers how to create a feeling of discovery. Total Playtime planned a videogames zoo, Character Select pitted the Thumper Beetle against the Skifree Yeti and I became increasingly worried that Gabe Newell’s new yacht is the setup for a horror film. Graham was won over by The Adventures of Elliott, before heroically watching most of the showcases and picking out 12 games that give him hope for the

This week on Jank: Brendan’s newborn still can’t be left unsupervised (skill issue) but he’s represented in absentia by this week’s Character Select, in which Cat From Stray faces off against Dog From Half-Life 2. As the designated Car Guy I played Mon Bazou and deemed it a cheerier time than My Summer Car. Graham also attempted an opinion about cars but it was really about DRM and not trusting companies to preserve good things so I still cling to primacy.

He also argued that tinkering with games is as rewarding as actually playing them, in which he correctly observed that my car habit is biased far more towards tinkering than actually using them. On Total Playtime, Alice and I got very hot while talking about the death of Destiny and obsessive regard people have for Disco Elysium.

This week not on Jank: The Steam Deck got much more expensive, which is a very dark portent for the price of the new Steam Machines and indeed any sort of gaming hardware for the foreseeable future. Tim Sweeney got a bitchy dig in about it which is not the best look in the circumstances, but the