Jank (Page 10)

27 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: The Trials of Anubis

Dead reckoning

Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.

This week's Patreon episode is another demonstration of our fearless defiance of editorial convention, as we not only run our big quiz of the year in February, but do so by traversing the Egyptian underworld and resolving the gaming-related trials of Anubis.

Total Playtime: The Trials of Anubis

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Thrill as Nate breaks out the voice changer, Alice upgrades her eagle, Brendy challenges Nate on the single worst topic imaginable and we face a surfeit of burning snakes. Truly no other podcast combines questions about sales figures and GTA trailers with an extremely in-depth knowledge of ancient Egyptian belief systems. Which, not to be dismissive of other cultures, are remarkably complicated and a real hassle to navigate when you're simply trying to escape the grip of the underworld.

Plus: asking Shaq what a basketball is, "an enigmatic and barely understandable point in the journey", and the return of a beloved RPS regular. You can listen to the podcast right here on this page, and

27 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

Last week I suggested that you might play the new Styx game, Blades Of Greed. This week, Styx publisher Nacon declared bankruptcy. I guess you didn't listen to me and now you see what happens. Let's try it again.

Here's three games you could be playing this weekend. Let us know what game you're playing instead in the comments.

Harry Kim is asking for your orders, Captain, in a text prompt next to a picture of the USS Voyager. But look, it's not actually Harry Kim. Harry Kim was sucked into space and killed in season two and we replaced him with a different Harry from an alternate universe. Nobody talks about it but our Harry Kim is dead! Don't let Janeway cover up anymore dea-- — I can't explain right now, but that's not the real Harry Kim.

Star Trek: Voyager - Across The Unknown

This survival strategy game is supposedly a "faithful recreation" of the TV series, a very dumb show that I love very much. Presumably this means that the characters aboard the ship die constantly but then are miraculously restored within 44 minutes, their traumatic experiences never to be mentioned again. In fact, I'd be much more inclined to play it if it was more knockabout toybox than Frostpunk misery sim. Here's hoping.

Some magic guys blast fire at an enemy next to a bunch of cornfields and grass. — The use of fire in these fields is deeply irresponsible.

Towerborne

Stoic, makers of The Banner Saga trilogy, return with a new game with similarly gorgeous character designs. There's no turn-based thinkery here, however. This is a co-op action-RPG about biffing big monsters with brawler-style combos. A bit Dragon's Crown? A

27 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

A hoverbike hurtler that always ends in a ragdoll brawl

On your bike, mate

It's Next Fest, so we're sampling as many demos as we can this week. You can download this one here.

If you don't win your race in hoverbike racing game Airframe Ultra, you might at least batter your opponent into submission with a steel pipe in the clunky physics brawl that takes place afterwards. This is, as the following GIFs will prove, a wrenchingly cool-looking racer of the much-dithered retro variety. You speed across the chunky trash textures and dangerously high bridges of a future city where all the coolest kids are into jet engine hooners and grievous bodily harm.

A GIF of a racer in hot pink flying out of a narrow tunnel and coming to a halt against a backdrop of a sci-fi megacity. — Ah, London.

You pick up glowing piles of cash as you rush through narrow passages, storm drains, and busy motorways. Bash a boost button to get some extra oomph, but bash it too much and your airframe will explode. Even going too fast for too long will make your mechacycle overheat and splutter to a grinding halt. You can jab people as you pass them, like in ye olde racing game Motorstorm. Or in my case, you can be punched in the jaw just as you are feeling like the coolest racer in town.

The player lands after a big jump and is struck by an opponent who catches up from behind. — Furious.

That's fine, there'll be time

26 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

Ready to die hot and confused? Here's a hardcore orbital warfare sim

Let them cook (their enemies)

It's Next Fest, so we're sampling as many demos as we can this week. You can download this one here.

Some interstellar navies run out of fuel in the middle of a space battle. I ran out of fuel 51 days before the battle even began. In Spacefleet: Heat Death you are given a map of solar system (well, just the Earth and the moon) and asked to hop from station to station, Lagrange point to Lagrange point, building up a fierce little gang of spacekillers so that you can survive an incoming bunch of baduns. The trouble: it is all presented like you are sitting at a computer workstation in NASA and if you don't know what Delta-V is from years of Kerbal Space Program you may as well put a giant laser to your head right now.

This is a strategy game rooted in hard sci-fi. It's the 23rd century and the Earth is swarmed by filthy spacetrash. You can buy ships and arrange them into fleets to fight or trade with many dirtbag factions - there are missile frigates, laser wielding corvettes, artillery bastards, fuel tankers, cargo haulers. They all look sort of the same, but each

25 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Beyond Words is Scrabble given the Balatro treatment

Spell is other people

It's Next Fest, so we're sampling as many demos as we can this week. You can download this one here.

The Beyond Words demo comes with a prominent but confusing pedigree: it proudly states it’s “from the makers of Goldeneye and Timesplitters” but bears absolutely no relation to either, rendering the association moot to the point of negativity. It’s like emphasising Babe 2: Pig In The City is “from the maker of Mad Max: Fury Road”: factually accurate, and doubtless both benefit from the same hard-won expertise, but you wouldn’t want to leave die-hard fans of either together without supervision.

There is no shooting, sci-fi or even synth music here: it’s Scrabble, and specifically Scrabble given the Balatro roguelike treatment, to an almost embarrassing degree of fidelity. You’re rewarded for placing longer words and using more annoying letters in the standard Scrabble style, but everything after that is overpoweringly reminiscent of LocalThunk’s creation.

You have a set of power cards granting buffs and multipliers, consumable boost cards that level up scores, and a store window at the end of each round to purchase more of both, using coins accumulated according to your remaining

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 tail and more varied options and fights over time.

23 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

What is your fondest memory of jank? 14 game devs tell us

A celebration of unintentional comedy in games

Jank, the website, is one month old. That's old enough to cry for attention. Which is what we've done. We gave this PC games blog its name out of fondness for broken but ambitious games. Jank is often the byproduct of game designers trying to bulldoze their way through realistic expectations. There are borked games and then there are borked games that exude raw zeal through ragdolling corpses or flying animals. When a game reaches for the sky, it sometimes turns the skybox inside out.

We aren't the only ones with fond memories of jank in videogames. To celebrate our scrappy website's continued existence, we emailed a bunch of game developers and asked them a simple question: "What is your favourite memory of jank in a game?" Here's what they said.

A vault dweller runs across the wasteland, passing a red building. — You can't walk the dog if you use fast travel.

Brendon Chung, Blendo Games

(Lead designer of Skin Deep, Quadrilateral Cowboy)

"During my playthrough of Fallout 4, the fast travel system stopped working. This meant my only mode of traversal was: walking. To get anywhere, I had to hoof it. And it was great?

"I became crazy stingy about how much stuff I was lugging around. Embarking

22 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading.

Good morning, videogames. As you read this, I pray that I am having an actual lie-in. I must recuperate after spending all of Saturday tired and wounded, after having spent all of Friday evening fighting off the brigand Edwin from aging ad-funded webzone RPS. After several hours of struggle, he fled back into the underbrush, his devious mission unfulfilled, and his current whereabouts are unknown. I suspect we shall see him and his rotten ilk again. For now, at least, I retain the strength necessary to share some articles, videos and podcasts worth consuming from across the past week.

Sony closed down Bluepoint Games, the studio best known for remaking Demon's Souls, without them having released a new game under Sony's ownership. Nathan Brown tackled this with customary scorn in his Hit Points newsletter this week.

With new blockbusters taking longer and costing more than ever to make, and nostalgia never a more powerful currency, shuttering a proven specialist in remakes and remasters is frankly insane. Casting out a team of such deep technical expertise and, more crucially, such broad institutional knowledge — Bluepoint doesn’t just know its own tools and technology, but also those of the studios whose games