31 Jul 2026 Jank business

Jank is six months old - here's our best stuff so far

We have written a lot

By Brendan Caldwell

We are celebrating being 50% one.

Jank has been alive for six months. That's older than some babies I know. Since our launch at the dawning of the year we've been writing non-stop, except for the hours 9am to 5pm, which is when we have to work real jobs to feed our families, dogs, and cars. Like many of you, we are not permitted to Jank on company time.

This hasn't slowed us down. We've written over 200 articles so far, and commissioned more from our favourite word mercenaries roaming the land. You've maybe missed a few of these articles and I don't blame you - you're a busy person, you have obscure JRPGs to play I have never heard of. So here's a round-up of our best work so far. Alongside a quick look at our plans for the future.

We reviewed new and old games

We've reviewed 17 games in total so far, which may not sound like much compared to bigger websites. But look at us, we're tiny. Some sites no longer bother to write reviews at all, or only focus on the big releases. But we don't discriminate between fancy new blockbusters, glitzy small-team hits, or games that have been out for years. We serve the reviews we want, and you'll eat what you're given. You hear?

We talked to developers

What is the point in being fully trained journalists if we don't go out and ask questions once in a while? Granted, we're not doing any deep investigative journalism here (we do not have the mustache budget to send Jonty undercover at Rockstar) but we still like to chat with devs about game design, level design, and writing. I heard you like it when smart people say smart things.

Piping hot opinions

The double jump is overrated. Metroidvanias are dead. Microsoft is good, actually. Games media is full of opinions that will burst the blood vessels in your forehead. We do not write such things. Yet we do recognise the strength of a solid op-ed. So we stew our thoughts carefully. This internet deserves a better kind of clickbait.

Let me write you a list

Jank comes from magazine culture. To us a list feature is not a grubby SEO tactic about keeping evergreen repositories full of affiliate links that you will stumble upon when typing "best shoot vid gams" into Bing. We like a list because it is a bottled distillation of the writer's tastes, histories, and knowledge. You can disagree with our lists - it is unavoidable - but you'll always learn a little bit about us alongside the games we choose. You'll see more list pieces in future, but here's a taste of our tastes.

Books!? On a games blog?

Why not. The average UK citizen's time spent reading has plummeted to minus 600 hours every week. That means our literacy is almost as bad as our numeracy. But you don't need to read a terrible novel to fix this - we will do it for you. Alice's review of Dungeon Crawler Carl is our most popular article so far, and for good reason. She has likely saved many of you from terrible pain.

The Total Playtime podcast also runs a book club series called Text Adventure, where we read official videogame novelisations, and boy have there been some stinkers.

The next season of Text Adventure will start soon, and this time Alice has handpicked some books that may not be utter dogshit, such as a Heaven's Vault novel and... a Gears Of War book? Okay, I'm skeptical again.

We played together

We don't get lots of time to do this kind of article, in which we all sit down and play something with one another. But when we do, it is always funny.

Freelancers

We are aware from historical precedent that three middle-aged men who like cars may have a limited view of the world. So we have hired writers we know and trust to scribble entire words we may not have thought of. It is embarrassing when their posts perform better than our own, but we have medium-to-thick skins, and will begrudgingly accept our place in the games media strata. Please subscribe, because we want to keep doing this, and doing it better. Let's look at some of our friends' best stuff.

Sin Vega took over a city in the future, playing as the only good sort of AI (one that is going insane in a videogame). This includes sentences such as: "Figure out who you are, you goddamn coward" and "Beep boop beep, little piggies."

Jay Castello reviewed the spiritual follow-up to cult interactive detective fiction game Type Help, and found it very very good.

Nic Reuben went on a dander through singleplayer extraction shooters, outright refusing to face his fear of playing with others.

Alice Bell made breakfast for bigfoot.

Jeremy Peel reminisced about how FPS grenades never got better than in the first Halo, where they exploded with huge columns of dust you simply don't see anymore.

Jim Rossignol wondered why everyone in the games industry is suddenly trying to make the world's most popular extraction shooter when the best one, Hunt: Showdown, has been here the whole time.

Thank you to all our freelancers so far, without whom that "over 200 posts" brag would be far less impressive.

Shitposts

Why on earth should we ever take videogames seriously? Have you seen the state of them? Pathetic. We will continue to write what we affectionately term "shitposts". These are short, dumb bits that we cannot help but write. We're not sorry.

Special weeks

Perhaps the biggest example of the shitposter's approach to blogging was Wall Week, a firm seven days in which we dedicated all our coverage to walls in videogames. We were celebrating our paywall going up, you see. (Please laugh). Yes, this was effectively a week-long shitpost that, um, accidentally turned into something much more sincere.

On the reg

Our regulars are immovable monuments of words. Every week you get a Lie-In, a podcast, and a newsletter. Every month you get a simulator review. Every six months you get a post where we brag about how great we are while simultaneously asking for money. Oh look, you're reading that right now.

Quality of Jank

Not everything about running a website is about writing articles that annoy people. Sometimes you alter the HTML to annoy people too.

To that end, we added an RSS feed, a dark mode, gift subscriptions, and a tip jar, in case you just want to give us an extra few bob. I'll be honest, this is mostly Graham being heroic behind the scenes and tweaking dials in Ghost late at night to make cool shit appear. For example, after the paywall went up subscribers asked for a special supporter-only RSS feed which would include full articles. Graham made it happen.

Meanwhile, in businessland Jonty fully merged us with Total Playtime to officially consolidate all reprobates into one pit. He also routinely speaks to [spits] lawyers and accountants about whatever it is those people talk about.

I do nothing to improve quality of life or background administration at Jank, except yell at people in the Discord.

Thank you

A begrudging thank you to our fellow independent media freaks across the sea, Aftermath, for having me on to chat about the site when we launched it and for generally being supportive writers-in-arms. I will never say thank you to RPS, even though I still read and link to them all the time and Edwin regularly emails me pictures of his dinner saying "are you hungry peasant hahahaaha" (he doesn't do that, Edwin is nice).

The future starts slow

There is more ahead for Jank. Put us in your RSS feed or follow us on Bluesky for more good wordsing. We've lined up some fun list features for the coming months, and we have loose plans to organise yet more themed weeks, as well as hopes to start covering events again in some form, maybe next year. We also - and perhaps I should not be telling you this - are sitting on a veritable hoard of Sin Vega articles. I do not know the threshold of subscriber numbers required to unleash them, but we must surely be hitting it soon...

If you have enjoyed any of this, or find yourself coming back to Jank again and again for your games journalism, please support us with real world money (assuming you don't already fling coins at us) or consider gifting a subscription to the fellow idiot in your life who is also cursed to love PC games.

Jank is still young. Six-month-old penguins are known to perish without regular subscriptions from their penguin community. Is that true? No, but it is an instructive and useful metaphor. Do not let Jank die, or you are a penguin killer. We can only keep this going thanks to the cash loyal readers throw into our hat. If you have not done so already, please think about subscribing. Also I have a weapon. I won't ask you again.

Or not for another six months anyway.

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Brendan Caldwell

Brendan is a critic and games journalist with 15 years experience, and writer on a few indie games which he is honour-bound never to talk about on Jank.