Jank Mail: The wrong sort of corridors

It's Saturday, so let us take stock of a week in Jank. Sin Vega reviewed Thousand Hells, an RPG that forces you to build your team based on vibes rather than numerical stats:

Thousand Hells is sometimes annoying. But it's a price paid for those moments in between, where you have no sure solutions, but some options that, when you stop taking them literally, get you imagining. Maybe "Fyarg is poetic" could help them identify patterns in the stonework? What if "stealthy" could work figuratively, convincing a judge with an unexpected argument? Hidden factors can make a poor choice work anyway, but NPCs too are interpreting, and like Six Ages, sometimes reward a counter-intuitive approach. And so occasionally you'll be fleeing from monsters, and swear aloud after drawing "Oromal is a virtuoso", but then hover over it for a moment, and think "Actually... what if..?".

For this week's Living in Sim, Brendy abandoned the quests in Nivalis and became an avuncular unemployed person, which improved the game considerably.

Nivalis may be summarised as Cyberpunk 2077 without the violence. But there is another way to think of it. It is Bernband with an itinerary. For Bernband enjoyers, that is a sentence equal parts horrifying and compelling. The beauty of Tom van der Boogaart's alien walking sim is in its slow sense of otherworldly exploration, the lazy feeling of being in a train station in a faraway place, watching the world go by. That same beauty is present in Nivalis, but it exists under a layer of hustle culture.

Sin's mid-vintage recommendation this week is J Edgar Hoover simulator Jey's Empire:

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.

Also this week: Nic's strategy game column commended us to the Cyber Knights, and Brendy endorsed creating bonsai Barbicans in Tiny Brutalism. The latest Text Adventure episode of Total Playtime discovered that the Bioshock novelisation is shot through with ellipses and heavy-handed game references but nevertheless manages to be quite good, and The Lie-In highlighted vintage Japanese videogame magazines and Sonic The Hedgehog's relationship to capital.

Outside Jank, Unity unveiled a new AI tool for generating videogames (based on a Google AI tool for making videogames) which obviously lots of people hated, but made it much worse by basing its main ad on somebody creating a game about a “space corridor” which makes the average Robox slopfest look like Bioshock. This is doubly baffling given that at least one of the other live demos actually looks like a videogame, but we got a space corridor game jam out of it so maybe Brendy will be the real winner.

Paramount acquired Warner Brothers which means that Paramount Games is now in charge of Rocksteady and TT Games, a brave new dawn that could lead to a multiplayer brawling game in which Batman faces Rick and Morty but let’s be honest it’s going to be layoffs again, isn’t it, what with it having three years to save $6 billion in service of an $80 billion debt load. As a side effect of this Bobby Kotick is back in videogames, which gave everybody a new opportunity to link to the Wall Street Journal.

Some of the people who got ditched from ZCOM got their jobs back, and some of the people making State of Decay 3 got a stake in the company that now owns it, but a large number of them didn’t so the big picture remains bad. Microsoft took time out from firing people to launch a new spinoffs division and put a former Reddit and Facebook product leader in charge of Minecraft, so let’s look forward to that demonstrating the same level of commitment to user experience. 

Sony sold off a load of VR patents to Meta, further confirming it’s going to be Valve vs Facebook to define the future of VR as a format. This can be characterised as bookish philanthropist vs. Disney-Channel TV villain and while the latter historically loses that hasn’t really been the energy of the 2020s so far. Related: Facebook started charging people to link to websites, so make sure you’re recommending and supporting the ones you like.  

There was some brief drama about Xbox having the streaming rights to GTA 6; they don’t, and the fact that nobody cares is another indicator that game streaming is just not going to work as a concept. Jagex is doing another Runescape but with better lighting. The GTA 6 leaker resurfaced to show hog and ask for money, and interestingly didn’t use OnlyFans for the purpose.

Other things we have learned: the secret to low-budget immersive sims is to embrace progressive urbanism and have a walkable city although you also have to reject public space by having buildings that can’t be opened, so, swings and roundabouts (figurative). Richard Garriott gets the rights to Ultima back next year, and he doesn’t know what he’s going to do with them yet but I’m going to assume that Kickstarter will feature somewhere.  

Lara Croft and dinosaurs as DLC for The Crew 2 is the sort of crossover that I cannot imagine any normal human wanting, so either there’s a very specific fandom out there I’m not aware of (plausible) or a brand marketing conference got out of hand (likely). Wardogs will add weather and the ability to bet on yourself, embracing the current trend for prediction-market-based fraud. We’re getting a Machinarium sequel because the world is ending, which is fair enough but it’d be really nice to have a more purely creative reason, wouldn’t it.

Our readers have brought their own insight. Rackham understands how the PC gaming community will respond to Thousand Hells:

I can't wait for the inevitable mod that adds the numbers to all the screens.

Andy Jones had a simple but effective example of games as therapy:

I also totally biffed a job interview in the middle of the week and just needed to kill some stuff to get rid of my frustration, so booted up Doom Eternal for the first time.

I'm going to steal Graham's bit and end on a music reference, with terikayi's suggestion of distinctive critical voices covering a different medium:

Alphonse Pierre is a vanguard for new, weird rap who also writes very cynically about the mainstream; Kieran Press-Reynolds is an expert on hyperpop who also does TikTok content; Nina Corocan is a trustworthy reviewer of punk and indie; Shaad D'Souza has found a voice being incredibly annoying to pop fans.

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