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04 Apr 2026 By Alice Bell Podcast

Total Playtime: MrBeast Big Naturals

Plus: mining sexual tension

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 we have fun (for a given value of fun) discussing Epic's mass layoffs. They got rid of a thousand actual people, for what I think are very vague reasons, i.e. Fortnite is somehow not making enough money. This seems like an impossible circumstance. Fortnite is basically a printing press that produces sheets of dollar bills with Tim Sweeney's face on.

Total Playtime: MrBeast Big Naturals

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Maybe he should stop trying to make a shop that most people don't use because its UI is still really bad and annoying. Why isn't there a half decent way to sort the games I have? Why does the application act like me asking it to order my game library in order of purchase is a task of the same difficulty as God asking Abraham to, like, seriously murk Isaac?

We also discuss Sony's dynamic price testing, which sees the return of a much beloved beans metaphor.

03 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

This isn't just a weekend, it's a Mega Weekend. That means many of us around the world have both today and Monday off work, and need games worthy of filling such a bountiful gift of free time.

I've got three suggestions for what you could play, but share your own intentions in the comments below.

Two women talk to each other. One, named Alo, says, "It's hard but also... brings back memories." — I'm sure this is all as peaceful as it appears and nothing bad will happen.

Fishbowl

"Fishbowl is a narrative game about dreams, grief, and hope," reads its Steam description, but you can probably tell that much from the screenshot above. This sits somewhere on the spectrum between To The Moon, Undertale, Yumi Nikki and Omori, with cheerful pixel art paired with inky dark voids. I feel like real life as enough inky dark voids as it is, but I know many who eat these games up.

A watery shockwave circles outwards from the player, hitting monsters that surround him, in a land of pink seas and green fields. — There's colour and spectacle in this Survivors-like that makes me want to play it.

Temtem: Swarm

For about three weeks in 2022, creature collecting and battling in Temtem was the hottest game in town, as finally the PC had something to offer those with a Pokémon itch. The excitement didn't last,

02 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

The lost wonder of Minecraft comes back in Lucid Blocks

It's Notch your usual crafting game

A hideous being stands in front of me, with a fleshy body rendered fuzzy through heavy dithering, and a cracked spherical head with the unsettling happy face of 1970s hippy logo. "O son of man," says the monster. "What lies ahead is a withering carcass. A bloated festering limbo, in which your soul will decay for all eternity."

The creature neglects to mention that this purgatory is a lot like Minecraft.

Lucid Blocks is a crafty block-bashing game about not knowing what fresh hell this is. You are very likely dead, or possibly just extremely asleep. The surreal world that forms around you is, like Minecraft, procedurally generated from a seed - in this case, a single word. You crumble blocks, gather them to your hotbar, and plop them down. There is some end goal, the creature tells you, but only in "oblivion" does it exist.

Remember your first steps into the world of Minecraft? I do. It was 2010 and I was crashing in a friend's spare room as the Yorkshire winter rendered us all desperate for ale. Minecraft was an escape into a blocky dimension where you could build a far more affordable

01 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith Marathon

What we talk about when we talk about running (in Marathon, while playing Marathon)

Let's try to convince Brendy that Bungie's shooter isn't all about dopamine

Last week, Brendy explained his feelings about Marathon, Bungie's new extraction shooter. He didn't like it, arguing it was merely "going double-or-nothing on the simple psychological and adrenal hacks that define [the] genre".

Sounds like something we should all play together, thought Jonty and Graham. So we did. Will we be able to convince Brendy that there's more to Marathon than gambling and barcodes, or will we all repeatedly die in a prefab outbuilding while pathologically refusing to watch the lore videos? The following chat has been edited for length and clarity and to remove roughly nine of the times we died.

[Graham and Brendy are on a run in Perimeter, Marathon's starting map. Brendy needs to smash a lot of windows. Graham needs to destroy an antenna.]

Graham: I don't necessarily disagree with anything you said specific to Marathon.

Brendy: You just disagree with something I said that was probably a big generalisation.

Graham: I think you were generalising about maybe multiplayer games quite a lot. I mean, you conceded yourself that you play games for distraction, but a lot of the time it sounded as if you were saying that

31 Mar 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Living In Sim

Living In Sim is our new column on "simulation", whatever that means

Try simulating some enthusiasm

Simulation is a huge genre, no two people will agree where it begins or ends. When a game nails "simulator" to the end of its name, like a big plank of wood, the case seems clear cut. Flight Simulator. Gas Station Simulator. Goat Simulator. But then you have all the high-level systemic games which simulate historical nation building or space exploration. Cities Skylines calls itself a simulation, so does Crusader Kings, Rimworld, Mount & Blade, and Dwarf Fortress. Racing sims distinguish themselves from arcade racers. And sports games can veer that way too. Session is a skateboarding sim in a way that Tony Hawk's is not. Football Manager 2026 is a sim, but Rematch? Hmmm.

As I am constantly reminding Jank readers, all taxonomy is folly. Viewed from the firmament, every game is a simulation. But there is often some extra pedantry or detail that pushes a game into being classified a sim. For the purposes of this column, I don't care where that fuzzy border falls, I only care that it exists. A sim is just any videogame that commits hard to the bit.

Why sims, of all genres? Well, we're a PC gaming site,

30 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Reviews

Screamer review: we don't give scores but this is one of those sevens

The original Screamer was the first racing game I ever played on PC. It was heavily inspired by Ridge Racer, but I didn't know that at the time. I just knew that me and my two older brothers were all competing in the same game, a rare occurrence given the age gap between us. Even in permanent third place on the time trial leaderboards, I was thrilled.

It didn't last. By the time Screamer 2 and Screamer Rally released in '96 and '97, my brothers had mostly moved on, and I played them alone. I remember being disappointed, unable to recapture the spark of excitement that I'd felt competing in the original. It would be foolish to blame the games for this, although maybe it did make a difference that I'd played actual Ridge Racer by that point. I think I'd instead be wiser to accept that the original Screamer wasn't a great game either, but that sometimes, games don't need to be great; they just need to arrive at the right time, for the right person. Enter Screamer (2026).

A raised highway racetrack through a city of tall buildings under blue skies. Three cars are visible on the track. — It's really difficult to operate four triggers and two analogue sticks and

29 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. As I write this, on Saturday evening, my son has just fallen asleep as I read him the closing chapters of The Hobbit. I don't take this personally. It's the first time either of us has read the book, and I think he's enjoying it, but there is perhaps nothing greater than lulling your child to sleep with a story. As you read this roundup of some good writing about videogames on Sunday morning, may you also drift off for another peaceful slumber.

Aftermath have been publishing up a storm with the delightfully named Woke Week, a "week of stories celebrating Woke 2". There were more interesting articles than I've yet had time to read, so I'm going to pick three. You should start with Gita Jackson's take on what Woke 2 means to her.

In this first version of wokeness, I wasn’t nearly as skeptical of figureheads and corporations co-signing social movements as I needed to be. I had this unshakeable belief that justice would emerge in the end, that people would do the right thing just because it was the right thing to do. I trusted companies,

28 Mar 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Epic fails

This week in PC gaming

It's Saturday, and you know what that means: time to look back at what happened in PC gaming this week.

Round these parts the big news was that Brendy doesn’t like Marathon very much, which might not sound like a particularly hot take but sure did attract some Discourse. He also found a job sim about router configuration and your reaction to that description will tell you exactly whether you want to play it or not. Sin Vega modelled a good use of AI, for a specific definition of “good”, and Total Playtime programmed some superior gaming conferences. Here is what you should be playing right now.

Beyond our hallowed walls, the magic 8-ball of games news remains stuck firmly on LAYOFFS as Epic canned 1,000 staff. The layoff announcements have become so regular and the numbers so huge that it can be challenging to visualise them, but looking at an incomplete list of the freshly-unemployed (which contains less than half of those affected) helps to bring it home: one of those documents so long it’s a physical chore to scroll through, listing lives across the world suddenly cast into a historically terrible