Jank (Page 11)

21 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. My kid has wanted to get into chess for a little while and I finally got round to setting him up on Chess.com. He played some challenges and some matches and, in the afternoon, came to me triumphant. "I am getting good at chess," he said, clearly proud. "That's great," I said, "I hope you are having fun." Later that evening, right before bed, he urged me to get my own Chess.com account so we could play together. I beat him three times in a row and he went to bed sad and quiet. Will he ever play chess again? Will I ever stop feeling guilty? It's clear to me that games were a mistake, but here are some links to words, videos and podcasts about them.

A picture went around the internet last week of the actor Jack Quaid wearing a mocap suit and wrapped in PVC piping, seemingly for his role as the gelatinous cube in the upcoming God Of War: Laufey. For Kotaku, Rebekah Valentine spoke to animators, actors, and a mocap technician to puzzle out the benefits of recording motion capture for a cube.

“There’s definitely a case

20 Jun 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: It's happening again

This week in PC gaming

This week on Jank, Graham found that The Witch’s Bakery offered nothing new and yet everything he needed, and that Blood Dungeon was a welcome addition to his sixteen-year history of Messhof games. Brendy crashed a Google plane into Google’s HQ and he’d do it again, you hear? He also brought back Living in Sim with a look at The Data Center, which is as soothing a distraction as you’d expect but does not reckon with the AI usage it both enacts and implies. I played Bad Magpie and found that it advances the bad-bird canon.

This week not on Jank the big news is, once again, Xbox fucked it. Widely-reported and conspicuously not officially-commented-upon stories reported that Double Fine, Compulsion Games and Ninja Theory are all on the chopping block, as part of a widespread bloodletting which was foreshadowed by the announcement of the Great Reset and the departure of the boss of Xbox Game Studios, who presumably peaced out rather than spend months reciting bullet points in severance meetings. This comes a mere week after a lavish fan hoedown which included a reveal of Ninja Theory’s new game,

19 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

I have crashed a plane into Google HQ, oh well

What a terrible accident

Google have released a flight sim. Or, to be more accurate, they've made an experimental Google Earth-based flight sim into a toy you can play in a web browser. The view is taken over with the glowing green lines of a classic flight HUD. You control pitch and yaw with arrow keys (but it works better with your mouse) and heave your thrust up 'n' down with the PageUp and PageDown keys. It is as if you are flying a plane. Wow.

You can visit incredible places in Google's sky bus, such as Mountain View, California. A beautiful municipality, home to many large technology corpor– hang on, something is... oh no, would you look at that. We're losing altitude, the Aerogoog is plummeting. Mayday? I think we say mayday. We're on a collision course with – oh my, what are the chances – somebody should do something, oh heavens, what terrible luck.

The tumbling of my virtual airtube into the headquarters of the world's biggest magic phonebook may cause some alarm among sensitive readers. Please, do not be afraid. Crashing planes in flight simulators is one of the simplest and most ancient joys of PC gaming.

19 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Aside from lots of Next Fest demos

This has been another relatively quiet week for game releases, because what you're supposed to be playing are the demos released as part of Next Fest. I'd personally recommend Blood Dungeon. If you once had a traumatic experience with a coverdisc and now the idea of a demo triggers a panic attack, fret not: I've still pulled out three newly released games you could play instead.

Tell us what you are playing in the comments, whether it's a demo or not.

The Adventures Of Elliot: The Millennium Tales

The demo of Elliot released several weeks ago and its combat and art style won me over, even if its story and characters seemed gratingly anaemic. That seems to be the broad consensus from reviewers now the full adventure/tale is available. This is a Zelda-style action-RPG with real-time combat rendered in Square Enix's 2D-HD style, and seems to promise a good time as long as you're happy to turn your brain (and maybe ears) off.

City Car Driving 2.0

I played a lot of the original City Car Driving and this sequel offers the same straight-faced simulation of traffic

18 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Living In Sim

The Data Center is where dreams go to die

Join my professional network on 192.168.0.1/24

I suppose it's time to reconcile my love for engineering marvels with the world's collective nosedive into technofeudalist hell. Okay. I can do that. Just as I find fighter jets impossibly cool, but do not actually want them used to explode people, I think data centres are impressive, but I do not like to see them sucking the world dry like a parasitic force beyond any ordinary human citizen's control. And since I am broken in the brain, the only way I know how to settle conflicting emotions like this is to play a videogame.

Data Center (US spelling) is about being a technician in charge of a data centre (UK spelling) and making sure all the wires go into the correct holes. On arrival to this new virtual workplace I find a radio on a nearby desk. I turn the radio on. It plays a sound I shall not classify as music. I turn the radio off. Time to get to work in a very compelling sort of hell.

Living In Sim is our monthly column about simulation games, and the frequently stupid misadventures they inspire.

This is an early access job sim all about

17 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

Blood Dungeon is the future games deserve

The demo is the best freeware game from 2010 you've ever played

Blood Dungeon is the kind of game that makes me want to simply repeat "BLOOD DUNGEON! BLOOD DUNGEON! BLOOD DUNGEON!" for 300 words and call this post done. It's the kind of game that felt like the future of the art circa 2010: a work with, regardless of team size, a clear authorial voice; with simple pixel art which seems to fizz; with ultraviolence and verve and arcade flair; with a sense of humour and an economy of design.

None of these things are a surprise. Blood Dungeon is the work of (among others) Mark Essen, the creator of Nidhogg, which I first played in 2010. His work felt like the future of the art then and it still does now.

For all Blood Dungeon feels like the product of a simpler era of freeware game design, it's also tied to indie gaming's most modern expression: the autoshooter. Like Vampire Survivors, your challenge here is to avoid enemies and kite them around while your weapons carry out their task automatically. This is married to a platformer in which you stick to every surface, letting you clamber up walls, hang from ceilings, and balance along tightropes with ease.

16 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

The Witch's Bakery demo got me out of a gaming slump

The demo is available now ahead of release in August

I've been feeling sort of listless lately. I want to be deeply engrossed in something and I'm currently not. My attempts to burrow inside a new game have been rebuffed several times in a row, and by the fourth or fifth time I abandon a new game within the first 30 minutes, I start to lose the will to try another. Book lovers talk a lot about being in a "reading slump", a minor malady that's often resolved by reading something short or re-reading an old favourite. When in a gaming slump, I often do the opposite, seeking out larger and more labyrinthine games as my desperation for absorption grows. This is a mistake.

The Witch's Bakery arrived at just the right moment. The demo, available in the ongoing Steam Next Fest, does not require any burrowing on the part of the player. Its delights are on the surface.

I mean, just look at it. Looking at it is most of the pleasure.

Lunne is a witch who has moved to Paris to open a bakery with her magical associate, a talking cat named Orio. You control her days and nights: serving customers their desired

15 Jun 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Bad Magpie develops the bad-bird canon with more tools in a weirder world

Angry Bird (singular)

Amid the lavishly detailed third-person gore of the larger summer showcases, the debut of Bad Magpie in the Xbox showcase was a welcome change: a cartoony style, cheery colours and a heartstring-tugging tableau of an injured bird left behind by its flock, with a slightly demonic twist when said bird picked up a burning log and torched its bucolic environment.

Having played it, I can confirm that the game is more or less exactly what it looks like: a mildly unhinged approximation of Untitled Goose Game which gives its titular bird some more inventive puzzles and a series of tools with which to solve them. And there is quite a lot of setting things on fire, too, at least in the section I played.

It quickly becomes apparent that Bad Magpie is a more fantastical affair than House House’s debut. While the goose had a perfectly-animated strut across a perfectly stereotypical English village, the magpie has a relentless hop through a more peculiar setting. Flowers wear beatific smiles, trees wear blank faces, cheery rodents gather to play, and the narrative calls for you to collect meteorite shards for a fallen star, to be delivered