Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Text Adventure is our videogame book club, in which we read a videogame novelisation and try very hard to like it. Ahead of the imminent arrival of Season 2 of Text Adventure, we’re finishing up our summaries of the first season.
This article series has not matched the broadcast order because I wanted to end here, with Andrzej Sapkoski's The Witcher: The Last Wish: a collection of short stories that is more-or-less (the publishing order is somewhat haphazard) the first time that anybody encountered roving monster slayer Geralt of Rivia. It is by some distance the best book we read, and unfortunately I must assume that is because it was written as standalone prose rather than something that was backed out of a game world.
In the wake of Microsoft’s latest decision to lay off, kick out, and otherwise terrorise its stable of game developers, onlookers were understandably outraged. If you've been a PC gamer for the past twenty years, there was probably a secondary feeling: one of familiarity.
If you predominantly play on PC, Microsoft has always been a force that destroys your favourite developers and makes the experience of playing your favourite games worse. You don't even have an era of BMX helmets and neon green consoles to look back fondly upon; instead your memory is filled with Games For Windows Live error messages and all the other studios Microsoft cut down.
Good morning, videogames. I am still, somehow, on holiday, but once again I have prepared an article for you to read in advance. How have I collected a collection of articles worth reading this week when I haven't been at my desk? Well, no one ever said all the articles had to be new.
Many remember Kieron Gillen's New Games Journalism manifesto. No one remembers what I'd consider its sibling, written months earlier by then-PC Gamer editor Mark Donald. Donald had just redesigned the UK version of the magazine to focus more on games post-release and to support the kind of in-game cultural reporting Gillen later referenced, and he posted an open letter looking for contributions. It's more of a pragmatic appeal for pitches than Kieron's call to arms, but I think it's nevertheless an inspiring mission statement. It was what prompted me to pitch to PC Gamer the following year, after which Mark handed me my first paid commission and, a few months later, a full-time job.
I'm trying to create a magazine that communicates the incredible experiences gamers have. A magazine that reports on the amazing transformations
And yet, like, there is something here, flittering about the halls of its hilariously brazen necropolis of zombie inspirations like a moth caught in a packet of moth-flavoured crisps. Do I dare call that something soul?
Eventually, I discover an asteroid, a planet, and a white dwarf. A few weaker signals dissolve before I can even readjust the satellites to look at them. My bosses are not impressed and they routinely pay me less than my daily wage because I have not fulfilled their exact orders in the emails. You are supposed to go outside and hike or bike
Videogames' three art styles: pixel art, embroidery, and skeletons
As you read this, I am still on holiday where, baggage allowance permitting, I will be playing games on my Steam Deck. Which games, I have no idea. Thankfully I have prepared in advance and below you will find your usual collection of games you could be playing. Where would you be without me?
Tell us what you are playing in the comments below.
A side-scrolling medieval folk tale in which every frame of character animation was created via embroidery. I have no idea how this plays out in practice - Thank Goodness You're Here meets Pentiment? - but it looks beautiful and I'm keen to find out.
Hand Of Fate was a beloved tactical deckbuilder that seemingly didn't perform well enough to support its developers, who effectively closed down after Hand Of Fate 2. Now a bunch of former staff have re-formed under a new studio to bring some of the series' crunchy deckbuilding into a bullet hell context. It's out in Early Access now.
Jank has been alive for six months. That's older than some babies I know. Since our launch at the dawning of the year we've been writing non-stop, except for the hours 9am to 5pm, which is when we have to work real jobs to feed our families, dogs, and cars. Like many of you, we are not permitted to Jank on company time.
This hasn't slowed us down. We've written over 200 articles so far, and commissioned more from our favourite word mercenaries roaming the land. You've maybe missed a few of these articles and I don't blame you - you're a busy person, you have obscure JRPGs to play I have never heard of. So here's a round-up of our best work so far. Alongside a quick look at our plans for the future.
We reviewed new and old games
We've reviewed 17 games in total so far, which may not sound like much compared to bigger websites. But look at us, we're tiny. Some sites no longer bother to write reviews at all, or only focus on the big releases. But we don't discriminate between
Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, formerly funded by Patreon. Every two weeks we publish a backer-only episode hosted by Alice Bell, Nate Crowley, Jonty and Brendan. You can listen to this and all previous Patreon-exclusive episodes by subscribing to Jank.
This week’s supporter-exclusive episode is a little piece of history, because it was recorded last month only a few hours after Alice had started reading Dungeon Crawler Carl for the first time. It therefore captured the first few moments of burning contempt, like a building collapse caught by a passing dashcam, that would ultimately result in the Dungeon Crawler Carl review.
Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Text Adventure is our videogame book club, in which we read a videogame novelisation and try very hard to like it. Ahead of the imminent arrival of Season 2 of Text Adventure, we’re summarising the episodes of the first season, which aired while Total Playtime was still Patreon-funded.
In this episode, we considered it appropriate to review a book about a malignant spirit haunting a former workplace by summoning former colleague Matthew Castle, now of The Back Page podcast, who joins as our guest and was able to offer both incisive judgement and additional deep Castle lore for fans of the old RPS podcast.
The warning is there right in the author’s bio, which says of series creator Scott Cawthon that “while he is a game designer by trade, he is first and foremost a storyteller at heart”. This description indicates both a strong self-regard and tendency towards over-writing, which explains quite a lot about the hundreds of pages that follow.
Cawthon has since stepped away from the simple but very effective survival horror series that made him extremely rich, but back in 2015 he was still closely involved in everything that carried the name. This included co-writing the first novelisation alongside Kira Breed-Wrisley, a professional ghostwriter who went on to become the go-to FNAF novelist for a time: looking at the voluminous list of rewrites and departed collaborators on the movie, one suspects she was blessed with a supernatural patience.
There are traces here of something that could have been an average-to-good genre piece - a Goosebumps-plus teen horror story or a functional B-movie. The protagonist, Charlie, has a functioning inner life; there is an understanding of young lives and young obsessions, there are sometimes whole paragraphs of evocative prose. There is also, unfortunately, a non-negotiable requirement to spend five nights in a location where no sane person would spend five minutes, and that is merely one element of an increasingly incoherent morass of narrative elements that one suspects were dropped in throughout the writing process.
