Nic Reuben - Jank

20 Jul 2026 By Nic Reuben Reviews

Sol Cesto review

I hope the sun is dead forever

It's the second heatwave of the year in the UK right now. My PC quivers like angry blancmanche at the suggestion it perform even the laziest task, and Snickers ice creams melt down my palm and form crunchy bangles around my wrist before I can ferry them home to my face. Sol Cesto, you say? The sun has ceased? Sign me up!

But seriously, folks: the sun dying will actually wreak a terrible toll on the once-verdant earth and force you to eke out a dangerous living in monster-infested catacombs far beneath the soil. I love the concept of a dungeon that's marginally better lit than the surface, but it sucks down here. I keep being forced to shove gargoyle teeth into my gums, and there are massive magic bees everywhere.

An intricately hand-drawn 4x4 grid showing colourful blob-like characters of red, blue and green. — The red and blue monsters switch affinity each time you move. I call them 'butt imps'.

Each screen of the dungeon consists of four rows of four squares each, and each turn you choose one row to move to, landing on a random square. Some contain traps or monsters, others treasure or healing strawberries. You always kill monsters, eat fruit, or collect treasure you land on, but traps stay. Monsters are aligned to either strength or magic, and your chosen hero has a numeric score in each. Land on a two strength monster with a one strength hero, lose one HP. Land on a three strengther, and lose two HP, and so on.

"That's so much HP!", you wail, cravenly, producing a non-zero amount of spittle. "Why would I ever click on a row with a monster I can't handle on it? Am I stupid?!". It's fine. All adventurers are stupid, it's part of the job description. The reason you'd do that is because it might be the only sensible choice. Click the all-monster top row, and you're guaranteed to take damage. Go for the bottom, and you've got a 75% chance of getting some treasure, but you might land on your third toxic mushroom and die instantly. The very basic idea is to make the least worst choice each turn until you've knocked out enough squares to move on.

Except you might not actually want to play it safe - you might want to snaffle up treasure so you can buy handy, single use items from the merchant to counter the spiraling difficulty: healing potions, monster-killing arrows, a die that rolls a new room. Or, you might want to save your coins to pop in the bucket that takes them to the surface. Surface gold is safe gold, spendable between runs to diversify the dungeon's offerings, and also on a few new characters and upgrades. So: village coffers, or personal glory?

It's a much zestier approach to roguelike upgrades than plain buffs, since you're often just buying the chance to benefit - expanding a pool of possibilities with few guarantees that, say, the merchant will have the toothpaste you just spent a fortune to unlock. And I love how bloody dungeony this all is. Everything is either elusive, expensive, a bit shit in ways you can imagine a fickle god getting a mild chuckle out of, or is some variety of monkey's paw, bottle imp, or that time Beat Saber added 3D stages but only for Imagine Dragons.

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18 May 2026 By Nic Reuben Reviews

Zero Parades: For Dead Spies review

Fatigue, anxiety and delirium in ZA/UM's sophomore game

At the bazaar, the citizens of Portofiro rummage through bootleg tapes from La Luz, a techno-fascist empire under a cultural blockade that prohibits the genuine article. Everywhere, conspiratorial lips whisper that La Luz's leader is the latest in a long line of copies. With each duplicate, his essence gradually thins.

I take notes and try not to get snagged on easy metaphors for a game that has far too much of its own vitality to ever feel ersatz, but never quite shakes the sense of being an imprint. I'm halfway through a second run now, and I still couldn't tell you whether the metaphor is deliberate or not. Much of Zero Parades is good enough that it deserves to be written about on its own terms, free of the ugliness and controversy that have hung over studio ZA/UM's leadership since shortly after the release of Disco Elysium.

In other words, Zero Parades deserves to be written about by someone who has never heard of studio ZA/UM, and has never played Disco Elysium. What I'm basically saying here is that they should have made a kart racer instead. Incredibly selfish not to,

17 Apr 2026 By Nic Reuben Cargo Hunters

My un-lonely jaunt through singleplayer extraction shooters

Who needs friends?

Cargo Hunters is a dead game, although not in the way someone itching to jig in the ashes of another Concord might use the term. No gleeful sloptubers have thrust the Black Spot into its hands by declaring it cooked in a needling video thumbnail, nor paraded dismal Steam charts as cheerfully as if those charts showed falling rates of leprosy.

But it is dead. An extinction event has left behind the furnishings of a game world designed for humans to share silly, bright little stories spun from emergent scrapes, but I will never meet another human for as long as I play.

This is fine and good. Cargo Hunters was born dead. Or, it might be better to say that Cargo Hunters is playing dead, its population of robots with human names mimicking disconnection from a server that was never there to begin with. You load in. You saunter-sneak towards objectives. You unload precious ammunition. You try to avoid fire but take some anyway. You realise you've overreached and run to the extraction point as fast as you can on two exploded legs. Alerted enemies screech and whirr like dial-up modems protesting their own