Jank (Page 11)

10 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

Maybe you shouldn't play anything this weekend. Maybe you should step away from your computer, stretch your body, and grab some vitamin D before the sun disappears. Maybe your aches and pains would diminish and your spirits would rise.

Not me, though. I'll be hunched over my computer like a goblin as always. If you're similarly cursed, read on - and let us know what you're playing in the comments below.

Some ramen soup is ladeled into a bowl of noodles on a food prep surface next to other food items. — This is basically identical to Jonty's mechanic sims but with soup instead of bolts.

KuloNiku: Bowl Up!

My kid used to play the Toca Boca games on iPad - which means, of course, that I'd play them, too. The best of the bunch was Toca Sushi Kitchen, which had you chopping items in a seaside restaurant to produce California rolls, et al. KuloNiku seems to be in the same vein: soothing, simple, tactile actions to prepare food for cartoon customers, with perhaps a bit more story owing to its presumably older target audience.

A tower of girders and makeshift platforms collapses into the ocean against blue skies. — This seems like the most fun part.

All Will Fall

What if Frostpunk but also Jenga? All Will Fall is about constructing a city at sea and making the kinds of political

10 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Living In Sim

Truck Mechanic is the sim you abandon by the side of the road

Let me give you the breakdown

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

I like to test the boundaries of a world, and today I will do so by getting my truck into fifth gear and soaring off a bridge into a river. "Your truck has been destroyed," says a game over screen, bringing a sense of mild relief now that I cannot hear all the heinous gobshites on a walkie talkie who I have quickly grown to hate. I had such high hopes for my inaugural simulator in this much-hyped column, but here I am fully and apologetically sodden in the wet pits of a Latin American waterway. There are some car crashes that simply cannot be repaired. Truck Mechanic: Dangerous Paths is one of them.

It's a straightforward premise: all the simple pleasures of unscrewing wheel bolts and calipers in Car Mechanic Simulator 2021, but with the added terror of doing so on the edge of a deep ravine. Instead of working on bits of other people's cars in a garage for cash, you are now maintaining a single vehicle of your own, taking it screeching and sputtering across a

10 Apr 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Anniversary Sausage Mailbag

At last, the Z list

This post is for paying subscribers only

Already have an account? Sign in.

08 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Here's our 17 most-loved multiplayer FPS levels

These maps lead the way to our hearts

When Graham and I sat down to scrounge together a definitive list of our favourite multiplayer first-person shooter levels, we knew that many of them would originate in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We are children of the dial-up deathmatch, so it comes as no surprise that many of our most-loved maps are simple blocky arenas made of grubby textures and low-definition skyboxes.

But what has surprised me is how the best modern maps feel like classic favourites. Any fast-paced bloodsport today still benefits from the fundamentals of map design that were hashed out by the makers and modders of yesteryear, and some of the most interesting multiplayer maps of modern times come about when studios commit to a strong theme, just like 90s developers were fond of doing, repressing any consideration of long sightlines or cheesy camping spots in favour of a single funny idea. Okay, nobody at Blizzard is making a homage to Facing Worlds. But battle royale maps that dramatically evolve are all about flavour begetting function. And the Finals definitely owes a thing or two to Quake 3. Don't get what I mean? Read on, and find out.

Crossfire

08 Apr 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

The Mass Effect Andromeda prequel has one thing to do, and does it badly

Toiling for Initiative

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 to bring their premium episodes to our paying subscribers - but we’re making this episode free to all.

Text Adventure is Total Playtime’s videogame book club, in which we read a videogame novelisation and try very hard to like it. In this episode, first released to Patrons last year, we were joined by RPS’s Edwin Evans-Thirlwell to read Mass Effect Andromeda: Nexus Uprising, the first of three novels about Bioware’s ill-fated sequel and the first chronological instalment, telling as it does the story of how the wheels came off the Andromeda Initiative well before Messrs. Ryder showed up at the start of the game. That means it’s the first Text Adventure book that isn’t forced to slavishly reproduce the events of the game, an advantage it proceeds to squander at some length.

Text Adventure - Mass Effect Andromeda Nexus Uprising

0:00

/5034.631836

The end goal is right there in the title: the uprising on the Nexus space station, the aftermath of which greets you

06 Apr 2026 By Jim Rossignol Feature

Hunt: Showdown is still showing other extraction shooters how it's done

Hunting down an old timer

Sure, these fresh gunslingers have a lot going for them. Jonny Embark and Bungie The Kid both shoot from the hip and they certainly put on a show. Those young guns make a lot of noise. But it's the quiet, gnarly old gunfighter you should really fear. That guy sat on the porch with a distant look like he has seen too much? The old timer chewing something he pulled out of his horse? He's the one to pay attention to. Because he survived.

The survival of Hunt Showdown is not simply the survival of players as they escape with characters unmurdered from its (thankfully crafting-free) first-person extraction game, but also in the title's remarkable ability to persist and grow over many years in a world where most multiplayer efforts are quietly taken out in the yard and shot. In the deadly corral of a hit-driven hobby the master has modestly abided, and in the year of our lord 2026 Hunt is not simply one of the most impressive and competently designed extraction games, it also has a fairly good claim on being one of the best multiplayer shooters ever made. As a veteran

05 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. If you're reading this, then you've survived both the clocks going forward and April Fool's day, two events designed explicitly to kill the exhausted and the middle-aged. Your reward is this long weekend of rest, relaxation and reading about some of the best writing about videogames from the past week.

It was nice of PC Gamer to write some fan fiction about us, with Jeremy Peel producing an ode to eurojank, both the "wonky yet wonderful projects of yesteryear, and their modern successors".

In the same way, ‘eurojank’ is an insult well-meant. On the face of it the term appears to condemn a whole continent's games as laughably buggy and low-budget. But speaking as a proud European, who has had the privilege to spend their working life flying to Frankfurt and Ghent and Uppsala to meet studios punching above their weight, I can tell you that eurojank—a term thrown around often in PC gaming circles in the early 2010s—is a byword for ambition.

Games like Balatro, Luck Be A Landlord and Raccoin don't literally let you bet your money away, but they and many other games have

04 Apr 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Beetle hats

This week in PC gaming

Another week has passed. What did we learn? Graham learned that Screamer is not good good but it's interesting and should be encouraged. He and I learned that Brendy should not play extraction shooters or anything involving monetary games of chance via our all-text Let’s Play of Marathon, part of Jank’s innovative media strategy of pivoting from video (although there are some animated GIFs, which are permitted). Bendy debuted his new Living in Sim column, and cherished how the dreamlike weirdness of Lucid Blocks is like Minecraft with the mystery restored. And on Total Playtime, I forgot my microphone which meant the others were left unsupervised and invoked the dread name of MrBeast.

Out in the PC gaming world at large, it was April Fools Day which of course meant Corporate Fun. IGN has a list of the ”best videogame jokes” which I cannot help but put into quotation marks, although even my black and joyless heart was lifted by the prospect of putting hats on the beetles in Hunt: Showdown, which is currently in the live game and will hopefully endure.

In more good-ish news Shinji Mikami’s new studio got bought