Jank Mail: Oh no, another algorithm

It’s been another week of finely crafted words about PC games on Jank. Graham spoke the hard truth that VR still just doesn’t work, most of the time.

John Wick doesn't have these kinds of problems. John Wick has never died because he was unable to access the gun on his belt because his belt was clipped through the floor while he was crouched. Jack Reacher neither. Jack Reacher has never died because his reality phase-shifted to a living room because his head strayed too close to a Ikea Strandmon footstool.

In the Lie-In, he topped his list of links worth clicking with a plea for favourite critics, which prompted some interesting discussion in the comments and on BlueSky.

Who are the videogame reviewers that, to you, have a definable point of view? I don't mean that you like their work, or that you agree with it. I mean, tell me the writers who have a coherently expressed set of aesthetic principles that they apply, resolutely and consistently, in their work?

Marsh Davies reviewed Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, and found it much more surprising than its appearance or predecessors suggested:

It is a departure from their relentless filth and pestilence: a breezier action spectacle that hews closer to mainstream conformity, composed of the popcorn action-adventure staples I crave. There is brawling, puzzling and, yes, a stunning island idyll to explore. But then, just under half-way in, it abruptly decides it isn't content to coast on genre expectations and introduces a novel and horrifying element, a bit of systems-first enemy design that is so unguessably strange that I can't bring myself to spoil it in this review. 

Our literary recommendations this week come from Yuts, developer of Norco and Silenus:

Don DeLillo's Libra, when the retired CIA analyst (Nicholas Branch) is reviewing eyewitness testimonies of Lee Harvey Oswald:"Oswald's eyes are gray, they are blue, they are brown. He is five feet nine, five feet ten, five feet eleven. He is right-handed, he is left-handed. He drives a car, he does not. He is a crack shot and a dud."

Graham returned to tell everybody that Knytt is still great, and that games reduced to finely-honed mechanical interaction are good actually, and Brendy is a rockist snob.

Brendy isn't wrong when he laments that loss of meaning when he calls for death to self-playing games, and our medium needs critics with aesthetic principles they're willing to fight for. I admire him for it, and share at least some of his criticisms. The problem is that I was always more of a poptimist. I can't deny the pleasure I get from every one of these Flanderized videogames, and I don't believe in guilty pleasures. Vampire Survivors is a pop song that's great to dance to. 

This week’s Total Playtime included some tips from Brendy about buying car batteries, and he followed that up with the best way to spend £10 in the current Steam sale, because he’s truly committed to service journalism.

I haven't played this one. The description reads: "this is a game about magnifying horses." I am willing to recommend this on trust alone. 

Out in the wider gaming world we learned that the Steam homepage is succumbing to an algorithm in “early 2027”, which means that a thriving industry selling snake-oil methods to exploit it will be turning over millions of dollars by the middle of 2027. Moving away from murky manual curation sounds like a good thing and it should technically make it more likely for unheralded games to thrive, but algorithms have only made life worse in 2026 and I see no reason to welcome another. 

In business news (bad) the studio behind Reigns and The Crush House shut down and Build A Rocket Boy appointed administrators. In business news (good) Grasshopper Manufacture ditched NetEase and went independent, and Devolver got taken private by its founders for a mere fraction of the money they made from it going public, which is a pretty on-message exercise in extracting huge amounts of money from The Man. In business news (indifferent) Ubisoft announced that it is using the skin of Massive Entertainment to dress the business unit making The Division, Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell and that MOBA that Amazon gave it when it decided it didn’t want to make console games any more. 

That game that hasn’t been announced yet and is not officially available to players has passed 200,000 concurrent players, a goal which most games struggle to reach even after doing both of those things. This serves as helpful context for understanding the insanity of 2XKO needing “high hundreds of thousands, if not millions” of players to be viable, something which was never going to happen. The ARC Raiders devs knew that launching a live game would be hard but they really want to stress that it’s a lot harder than you think.

There will be at least some non-AI-generated new games on Steam the day GTA 6 comes out. s&box has added necks in response to popular demand. Somebody vibe-coding a browser-based Fallout game got cease-and-desisted, which is for the best because a slop version of Fallout in Chrome would be the only thing that would run a data center close in terms of RAM requirements. 

Krafton killed another PUBG spinoff but don’t worry, there’s still at least one left. You can now use Xbox One game discs to unlock the game on PC, although you have to use the Xbox app so it’s not all good news. Guillermo del Toro’s conversation about making a Bioshock movie was “probably one of the most disastrous calls I’ve ever had” and he doesn’t mention Ken Levine but you have to assume he was at least on the line. 

What wisdom from below the author bios? Eleven also came to fight for Knytt’s honour:

Knytt has one of the best feeling jump mechanics in videogames, to the point that I don't know why it's not more influential than it already is. Fully powered up, you can jump well over half the screen and yet still land on a pinhead, like its the most natural thing in the world. Modern platformers feel restrictive and fussy by comparison. 

kemuel has come to an understanding about VR. 

I've long since accepted my headset is The Beat Saber Machine, much like how the kitchen mixer only makes cake. 

Sin has some tips on being a game critic

the first step is to become irretrievably insane 

That’s all for this week. Go and play some PC games.