Sin Vega - Jank

07 Oct 2026 By Sin Vega

Be a weird, racist, weird guy in Jey's Empire

Co, don't tel

Please, allow me the benefit of the doubt when I say how amusing it was to read the headline "Dr. King Murdered!", and think, genuinely unsure: "...was that us?"

Jey's Empire is not an FBI simulator, but a satirical, narrative sort-of simulator of a weird, paranoid racist struggling to contain his flamboyant urges while guarding the USA against the agents of immorality. Which of course means hippies farting about in the woods, a film where someone says "damn", or a Black person doing anything at all.

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This is Sin's column about the games of yesteryear. Not old enough to be retro, not shiny enough to be new. This is the hinterland of PC gaming. And the first of our subscriber goals!

It's crucial that everything is filtered through this horrible buffoon. J. Edgar Hoover will do anything to anyone questioning the status quo, but also make a twat of himself by personally phoning a Black Panther and pretending to be "ghetto", because he just can't help himself. He's doing awful things but the game ridicules him in text and design.

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05 Oct 2026 By Sin Vega Reviews

Thousand Hells review

Other hell is people

As readers in the UK will know, there are many hells, and you can and should put together a team to rob powerful figures within them. And such a team would of course be not a spreadsheet of optimal (ugh) builds, but a guessing game of hedged bets and approximate ideas.

Thousand Hells has you lead this team on a journey, first to reach hell at all, then to find and retrieve something, or get agonisingly close before making one too many mistakes and losing everything. But this isn't the arbitrary, timewasting death of the roguelike. This is just that story. It can be dissatisfying, and parts of it can not really make sense. This is at times its big flaw, and at others, where it feels most successful. Are we still saying "same"?

Each game is an adventurous journey followed by a heist, then a shorter but still fraught journey back. Each is also a named plot with a specific target, and could take you to one of four hells (the "thousand" are scene-setting) this time. It's also a new team, including you, the leader.

Handpainted style picture of a settlement set underground, brightly painted. A minigame plays out on the right, with tokens and gamey bits. Text describes the party saying "I'm sorry, friend ghoul, but we don't know the entry toll." The ghoul: "You call me friend? No one ever calls me that." Party: "As travelers in an unfamiliar city we extend friendship to all." Ghoul: "In that case, you may pass, and I forgive you for failing to bring me any sweet, delicious corpse flesh." — This caption is a formal request for Tunnel Ghoul fan art

23 Sep 2026 By Sin Vega Feature

Emperors work a gruelling 12-minute day in Stellar Monarch 2

Return of the macro

The trouble I usually have with 4Xeses is the fiddling. Shuffling units around, optimising the workers, replacing outmoded armies, making sure everything is building something useful. It's why a war kicking off is usually the point at which I give up.

The main ways to prevent this are delegation, and restricting the player's capacity to intervene. Stellar Monarch 2 combines both in a curious arrangement of massive scale and limited scope. It is a monarch simulator, after a fashion, wherein you're responsible for specific duties, but the rest are someone else's job. The empire won't grind to a halt without you, but it absolutely will not act on those things that require your instruction, like which planets to claim or what to research. Conquering and building three planets is a matter of clicking a few times to authorise it, then waiting. Fleets are regularly built and retired, applying research bonuses, and optionally redesigned in composition. The most complex bit of the game, but rarely needed.

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14 Sep 2026 By Sin Vega Reviews

Ostranauts review

Everything can be salvaged, but make it a curse

"Ostranauts, Graham, is I think a very Jank-y kind of game", I said, very differently to that and before I needed to fit it into an intro. This came from dabbling with much earlier versions, and from knowing that Graham loved Neo Scavenger, Blue Bottle Games's earlier survival game about undignified scrabbling and lusting after carrier bags. And that Brendy is a space boy, and Jonty touches cars. Throw in my love of salvage and you get a game about bumbling around space in a ship assembled by hand, one reclaimed component at a time. You get Ostranauts.

You also get lowercase jank. Lots of it. "Bordering on a professional dilemma" kind of jank. There is so much going wrong with this game that I'm unsure if this will be a recommendation or an SOS.

Ship control panel, with many modules, some with chunky switches, one showing a wireframe map as my ship narrowly zooms between two other ships — Incoming transmission, sir! It says "neeeeeooooooww".

It is a project game. I have a goal, and I see other possibilities on the way to meeting that goal. Some of those are incorporated into the project, others distract me and become the day's entertainment before I try again tomorrow. Others still become another project and oh my god what day is it. What year?

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09 Sep 2026 By Sin Vega Northern Journey

Northern Journey still feels like a secret

Fool of the wild

Summarising Northern Journey feels like a transgression. Maybe it feels so secret because we haven't covered it enough. Maybe it's because The Gaemars are liars and hypocrites who yearn for the gruel. Maybe it's because playing it gently awakens some ancient feeling that the world is vast and unknown, and full of dark and strange things instead of just more goddamn humans doing the same thing as every other human because that's what the other humans are doing.

Of the three things I know about Finland, probably the most relevant is that it borders Norway, where Northern Journey is set. But not really. Nobody names this region, nobody explains more than where to go next and what to look out for. Its setting is that place. The world before "the world" meant a list of countries and buildings and certainties and fucking adverts.

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26 Aug 2026 By Sin Vega Feature

House Of The Dying Sun rescued space from the nerds, but we let it go again

This machine kills traitors

This is not a war. There is no glory or prize to be won, no victory to be had. There are no gods to satisfy or rewards to covet. There is nothing to gain. You are not here to save the galaxy or prevent the apocalypse. There is a truth, but it is not holy. It is beyond holy. It is this:

Twelve traitor lords remain.

House Of The Dying Sun begins with an imperative tolling bell, and can only end in ruin. That is your explicit purpose. It tells you upfront, not with a cutscene or Sim Cameraman prologue, but in black and white, with intoxicating immediacy.

Levels open with thrumming drums and full engines warping you in to the target, under a beautiful classic font declaring dramatic titles like "Vengeance at Ember Field" and "Slaughter at Horuus Gate", in keeping with its almost 1970s filmic energy. Suns blot out enemies. An ally flies through the fire of missiles you shot down. One HUD marker doesn't rotate with you, and that feels better. Every level is a careful diorama, a stage.

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25 Mar 2026 By Sin Vega Bits

I am The Thing from the Tower

Chaos ex machina

More of you need to be playing narrative strategy-RPG Heart Of The Machine. I don't care that you'll enjoy it. I just want to see what you do.

I love this kind of game. Take your wiki and your tiers and your meta and shove it up your tedious spod arse. Heart Of The Machine wants you to explore, to imagine, to play with its premise: that you're an (actual) artificial intelligence, newly sentient, in a far future dystopian city. Now what? What kind of being are you? What should you do about the world?

Don't look it up. Figure out who you are, you goddamn coward. Make a decision. Be someone.

A monochrome, humanoid robot and a human silhoutte stand either side of a text box offering two player responses: "Accept the Nuclear Device", and "Ignore her and scan the facility". Less relevant is the event itself, detailing the human, a manager, offering the player a nuclear bomb and asking them to use it on a third party. — You have been blanked. But have you been "offering a nuclear bomb" blanked?

This is not a game to win or (ugh) "beat", but to play along with its many choose-your-own-adventure style events. Its earliest paths can diverge pretty widely, offering choices in story events like "Ask to see her wares" vs "Murder her for some reason", at least unless you look further into the option to "Start Therapy". There are wonderfully evocative choices like "Befriend The Creatures", "Design Something

24 Feb 2026 By Sin Vega Bits

I am very late for a beating with Treachery In Beatdown City

Silly but still topical

Becoming a games critic is a great way to think about failure all the time. Oh, you're tormented by that terrible time you didn't do enough? Amateur. The unwritten articles, the uncovered games, the abandoned projects: space-time itself recoils at the black hole of their uncountable billions. I should've stuck to shelving. You know where you stand with a shelf.

Treachery In Beatdown City made me feel this way twice over, thanks to a huge "remix" re-release, and thus a second layer of "Argh, I've left it too long now". Well, what the hell, let's do it now. You like smacking virtual jerks around, right? You like unusual designs and experimental genre fusions? You hate microaggressions? Well now. This is an interesting one.

It's a more cerebral Double Dragon where instead of button mashing, you alternately avoid enemies while action bars refill, then pause time to spend them in a Fallout 3 VATS-ish combo menu, ordering unique attacks with many status effects for preparing later moves or bypassing varied defences. The rhythm and balancing take a lot of getting used to, and a little too much waiting, but mean a long