Nic Reuben - Jank

30 Sep 2026 By Nic Reuben What's On Your Bookshelf?

What's On Your Bookshelf?: Norco's Yuts

"There's a scene of the shambolic protagonist getting destroyed in a game of tennis that converted me."

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to What's On Your Bookshelf? - Jank's bi-weekly chat with a mint-condition, laminated collection of rapidly appreciating game-makers about books.

Every so often, the paper books vs e-readers discourse will spontaneously reheat itself like a malfunctioning MRE. A thorny topic, surely, but consider that if a stray teardrop of sriracha falls on a Kindle page of Zola's Nana, it will then appear on every subsequent page until you wipe it off, creating the effect of an infinite, transient sauce globule echoing through spacetime. Conversely, a hardback copy of Puzo's The Godfather you dribbled marinara on will permanently be your sauce-stained copy of The Godfather, though only on a single, lonely page.

I'd like to think this tells us something important about the nature of something else important, although what exactly, I could not say. Perhaps this week's guest might know? It's only Yuts from Norco and Silenus developers Geography Of Robots! Cheers Yuts - mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

What are you currently reading?

I'm about a quarter of the way into Money by Martin Amis. I read Amis’s collection of book reviews years ago, and have intended to check out his fiction ever since. There's a scene of the shambolic protagonist getting destroyed in a game of tennis that converted me.

The other book on my desk is for research related to our new game, which takes place along Louisiana's coast. Last Days of Last Island by Bill Dixon, about the 1856 hurricane that wiped out a seasonal resort town down here. Dixon does a great job constructing his research into a continuous narrative.

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24 Sep 2026 By Nic Reuben Feature

You don't know what you got (the moon) until it's gone (blown up by a magic rat)

Total Warhammer 3's gorgeous map is going through hell

Somewhere in Nordland's forests, atop a rocky outcrop shaped like a crude arrowhead, a grey wolf howls at the sky. Countless hours in Total Warhammer 3, and it's my first time seeing her. I like to think she's saying goodbye to the moon.

She borks in lunatic prestalgia among dozens of bespoke dioramic sites dotted around the Empire of Man's territories. A mill here. A sports arena there. Cartographic peans to the industry and culture of the thousands of conscripts I'll gift dented cuirasses and spears over the length of my campaign, before marching them off to melt under gouts of sour-green warpfire loosed by cackling rats. In Nordland's port settlements - Dietershafen, Salzenmund - I picture dockworkers hauling and cursing, forced to pull double shifts after half the crew were ground to imitation crab meat by mammoth-riding raiders. Click the ports, and four building chains bear the heroic task of abstracting every non-military facet of the Empire's culture - farms, taverns, tailors, roads.

I don't bring these up to call the simulation gaunt. It's precisely the breadth and richness of Total Warhammer's adaption that invites me to dream of more, I think. The maddening brilliance of grand designs is how they plant seeds for endless grander fantasies. Why shouldn't a game world with this much on offer also contain everything, actually? Why can't I zoom in an extra layer - visit the taverns, hang with the soldiers I'm recruiting? Where are the complex strings of branching story events that let me hunt Skaven in Altdorf's sewers? Lazy devs, please fix (my washing machine, my brain, my life).

Instead, I'm thinking about the wolf and the granaries and the docks because it's taken me facing the end of the world - courtesy of three new apocalyptic end-game scenarios that devastate the planet's surface - to finally stop and smell the roses.

Not for Blood Bowl, apparently! That's its own universe.

This is Warhammer, of course, where even the roses reek. Just outside my capital city of Middenheim, there's a patch of swampland I've never noticed before. It's so small that it's difficult to move an army any amount and still remain inside of it. In the rare circumstance that Middenheim is ever under siege by two armies at once from this one specific angle, the attrition from the swamp might be enough to slightly weaken the reinforcing force in the one or two turns it takes to build battering rams. It is, in other words, meaningless. Unless…

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16 Sep 2026 By Nic Reuben What's On Your Bookshelf?

What's On Your Bookshelf?: Esoteric Ebb's Christoffer Bodegård

"I've heard it's similar to Disco Elysium. But Miéville’s must be better, because he has two"

Hell is ascendant. The nightmare moon hangs askew in the rust-blighted sky, low enough to reach down and steal a bite of your waffle cone. Again!

To your left, a battle-worn clowder of gangrenous strays mew the theme to The Godfather, miring your senses in discordant trills : Meooow Mow-mow mooow mow mow-mow.

From beyond the veil, exactly 58 tiny voices scrape at your fragile subconscious, each trying to tell you about a different roguelike card-battler released in the last four hours. Every one of them is 'must play', they insist. (whispery voice) Must play. Must play. Must Play.

Quick. Get inside. It's safe here. We have gathered all the videogames and burned them alive. Only books remain.

Welcome.

Welcome to the inaugural Jank-dition of What's On Your Bookshelf - our regular chat with a selection of excellent game-humans about books! Kicking things off, it's none other than Esoteric Ebb's Christoffer Bodegård! Cheers Chris - mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

What are you currently reading?

Liberal Fascisms! One of many essay collections of Žižek, his latest I believe. Once I got out of the slump of extreme-hardcore-crunch, writing thousands of words a day all throughout 2025 and up to Ebb's launch, I needed a cleanser. Or at least a solid hook to start reading again. I find Slavoj Žižek's pop-culture zeitgeist lens incredibly entertaining, and his work gives me the exact same dopamine rush I get from watching overtly political YouTubers rant about current day topics, except I get to actually stop and look up/learn about new sources/concepts/words every other page or so.

I'm also working my way through the Tales of Dunk and Egg! For one reason: I very much enjoyed the dread of watching Game of Thrones slowly collapse into complete sadness - starting with season 4 - since I read ahead to Dance after season 2 dropped. After watching AKOTSK with the boys (which was an experience), I decided to jump onto that same ship once more. I mean, I really hope the following seasons hold up. But now I'm invested, so bring on the pain!

What's On Your Bookshelf has returned thanks to new supporters of Jank helping us to reach one of our subscriber goals! Thanks to everyone who signed up over the past month.

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08 Sep 2026 By Nic Reuben Reviews

The Blood Of Dawnwalker review

Dawn Walker? I thought you said his name was Coen?!

Two weeks ago, the vampire that rules over Coen of Laslea's valley torched his village, captured his family, and cursed Coen to an eternity of blood thirst. This evening, Coen is standing on a mountain pass, getting pelted with rocks by large, jeering goat people. "Baah", they taunt. "Baaah-ha-ha".

Coen isn't happy about this, but he can't do a thing. This is because I've decided the goat people are my friends, so I keep choosing pacifist dialogue options despite three opportunities - and constant encouragement from my companion - to kill them all.

I'm having one of a handful of asterisk-free excellent times thus far in The Blood Of Dawnwalker. Mostly because the game has finally offered up a crumb of that good, good whimsy after submerging me in fifteen hours of muck, pestilence, viscera, laborious combat, torture, 'excellent artisanal' epic trousers, and despair.

See that castle? You can go bowling with it.

There are sweetly sombre vistas and scenes of chilling folk horror lurking in this cursed valley; awe and terror dancing around the maypole together. There are fascinating hints at a history of forbidden magic, and uncomfortably tangible tales of oppression tolerated through paralysing fear of the alternative. Before Brencis came, cruel boyars ran unchecked, and the black death ran rife. Now, every week at mass, his vampire court drink from the people, and share their blood in return. The plague is gone. The boyars were hanged. Newborns are the "strongest they've ever been". Vampire tyranny is one thing, but vampire populism? What a hook.

There is all that, plus some of the best violin scraping and the absolute best gnarled bog trees ever committed to Unreal Engine. But there's also such constant, droning misery and aimless sadism-as-set-dressing that Dawnwalker often devolves into a four Yorkshireman-esque pissing contest with itself. "It smells of rot and blood here," Coen groans as he enters a cave. Yes, Coen. I know, I know. It's rot and blood all the way down.

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01 Sep 2026 By Nic Reuben Feature

The new Onimusha has won parrying, now give it a rest

Sekiroverkill

Parrying is gaming's best and raddest adoption - a decisive and effortlessly stylish retort that serves instant, embarrassing karma to threats as diverse as lightning bolts, chainsaws, and freight trains. Press R1 to pay absolutely no respect. It's also a cheap trick that shrinks gods and monsters to the tiny space where your blades meet, reducing the shadows of colossi to whimpering bunny silhouettes. At their best, nailing a string of parries and ripostes feels like performing Swan Lake while winning a rap battle against god. At their worst, they're the design equivalent of blending a bag of spinach into sugary pasta sauce so fussy toddlers don't realise they're eating quicktime event.

I recently discovered my least favourite parry ever in Marvel's Spider-Man 2. Fights in Insomniac's Spidey games fizzle with fistly pyrotechnics so ill-suited to requiring you to anticipate incoming hands that Spidey's glowing head halo does it for you. In Spider-Man the first, you don't even have to consider danger until the same second you respond to it. This lets you focus your entire brain on what matters: doing stuff that makes you nod and go: "Oh yes. That's some shit Spider-Man would do".

Me when I'm being used as a comparative example to make a larger point.

But in the sequel, just knowing that a wiley thugoon might spring a parry-only punch forces a shift in priorities from "I want to do this" to "I don't want that to happen" which messes with the cadence something awful. It's so ill-fitting it feels like it emerged from a focus group, run by and consisting entirely of suits, each of them focused on suit-dazzling the other suits with the suitiest suggestions possible.

This is how so much of parrying feels to me now. It's Chris Pratt. It's Timbly Charmander. It's 20g of added bison protein in an 18g Chocolate Hobnob. I used to crackle with glee at clinching a "not today, fucko" against Ray's clanging mechasnout in Metal Gear Rising. Now I long for a game brave enough to snap my sword in half forever if I'm stupid enough to think I can deflect even a swerving bumper butt from a medium-velocity rat ambulance.

Onimusha: Way Of The Sword is not that game. It has five different varieties of not-today-fuckos you can use during a day in the life of true Edo period geezer Miyamoto Musashi, and something like four extra fucko-be-gones. You can block, dodge, super dodge, parry, and deflect, which is basically a parry with extra steps. Dodging fills an execution gauge, and parrying fills a gauge that engulfs your sword in crackling anti-fucko energy.

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27 Jul 2026 By Nic Reuben Reviews

I'm oddly fond of this shonky RTS that's decided Mass Effect is public domain now

An early access look at RPG/RTS hybrid ZeroSpace

Why bother filing the serial numbers off a beloved sci-fi property when you can simply use the file to scratch on your signature and call it a day? To be fair to ZeroSpace, not everything here is a knock-off of Mass Effect - quite a lot of it also pilfers from StarCraft. For instance, it has good ol' boy flamethrower marines that would definitely call Mass Effect a "space opry" if they ever said anything that wasn't a pun about setting people on fire.

Mostly I just wish I'd known sooner that you can do this. No one can stop you, apparently! ZeroSpace has basically Matriarch Benezia in it. The not-Krogan are here too, except they're also sort of the Cabal from Destiny. It's all up for grabs! I hope you're as excited for Nic Reuben's Denis Villeneuve's Frank Herbert's Dune Part 3 as I am. ZeroSpace is shameless, shonky, and wince-inducingly pricey for how early access it currently is.

And I sort of love it.

I sort of love it because, while transparently making a clumsy smash and grab for other, better works, ZeroSpace doesn't

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,