Jank (Page 12)

17 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

The Assassin's Creed Brotherhood novel doesn't understand how books work

A stabbing pain

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, and we’re also surfacing entries of Text Adventure, their video game book club.

This was the first book in the Text Adventure series, chosen according to the rigorous selection criteria of “what books do I own already,” and having completed the first season I am confident it is the worst. Its almost mesmerising awfulness is derived from a baffling commitment to including the entire plot of the game, which means it has to cram in five years of Ezio’s rebuilding the Guild of Assassins along with significant chunks of Rome. Nothing is excised, everything is present, including the clumsily staged tutorial VO.

Text Adventure: Assassins Creed Brotherhood by Oliver Bowden

0:00

/5467.794285

This is comically antithetical to good storytelling: quite apart from the fact there’s enough plot here to support a five-part series, key parts of the narrative machinery are missing entirely. Characters are introduced and then murdered immediately, people take time out from plot beats to recount stealth mechanics

16 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Swansea from Mouthwashing is the best alcoholic in games

This is the bad kind of drinking contest

Apologies to all fans of Harry from Disco Elysium, but the best alcoholic in all of videogames is a hamburger-gutted spaceship engineer who spends most of his time looking simply furious. Swansea is the low-poly blue collar spaceship mechanic in sci-fi horror game Mouthwashing. He is drunk for most of the game and even becomes - at one point - a mortal threat to your life.

Yet as all other male members of the ship's crew flail around during disaster with denial, paralysis or naivety, Swansea attains a form of grim enlightenment. He is darkly honest about himself at the very end. It's the cold honesty of his alcoholism that makes him stand out among the crew.

If you don't know Mouthwashing, consider those opening paragraphs my recommendation to go play it. It's one of Jank's best games of the decade for a good reason. It takes two or three hours to play and another two or three weeks to stop thinking about. Longer, clearly, if you're an underemployed games journalist. Spoilers ahead, et cetera.

Let's sum it up for anyone who needs a reminder. You're a crew making a delivery across space. The captain, for unknown reasons, appears

15 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading.

Good morning, videogames. My father turns 80 years-old today, opening the brief four-month window in which he is precisely twice my age. If another 40-year-old wants to merge with me to also become an 80-year-old, we can then create the world's first 160-year-old. Otherwise we can just read (watch, and listen to) some fine words about videogames.

Game arts festivals are disappearing worldwide, typified by Freeplay, the oldest art games non-profit, which recently announced that they were a year away from closing down. Robert Yang wrote a blog post that gathers together the coverage and conversation that followed the Freeplay news, the reasons why events like these are struggling, and what organisers might do about it. I've worked on enough (commercial, mainstream) games events to know that it was a miracle that any of these things ever happened in the first place, where "it was a miracle" means "it was an act of enormous dedication by a village of talented, passionate, generous people who could have had an easier time doing literally anything else." Hey that's all miracles.

Mads call this "The $1000 Problem": the event size / budget that is both too big and too small. For example it might

14 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Shooters, State of Play and Highguard

Plus: "excessive makeout scenes"

It’s Valentine’s Day, so let us slip into something more comfortable - like a look back at this week’s headlines.

At Jank Towers, Graham wished that games culture was more like book culture, although discovered in the process that the photography is harder than you think. I played Quarantine Zone: The Last Post and found it to be a deadening amount of busywork, and Car Service Together which was a more satisfying amount of busywork until I found out what Brendy was doing. Our members-only Discord now has a #jontys-garage channel and I wish to make clear that I had no hand in its creation.

Brendy also went back to the newly-denumbered Overwatch to see if it had indeed been reborn, and exclusively revealed that it’s still Overwatch. Finally, a games media outlet brave enough to say “it’s good, if you like that sort of thing”. He also rejoiced in the return of Samurai Gunn 2 and joined Nate and myself on Total Playtime to pick some game characters to be our life coaches.

Elsewhere in the gaming world, Discord said that it wasn’t going to force everybody to verify their age to use

13 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

My Retroid Pocket 6 arrived this week and I am immediately leaving on a family trip. Is this the perfect time to cosy down and play some retro classics? Oh friend. I didn't buy this thing to play games on it. I bought it so I could spend countless evenings tinkering with frontends, boxart, and metadata. Should I ever get the device set up just to my liking, it will be going straight in a drawer to be forgotten about. Fingers crossed everything is as fiddly and time-consuming as I think it should be, or I'm going to have to buy an AYN Thor as a second project.

You might be built different. You might want to actually boot up a game. Here's a few you could try - and tell us what you are playing in the comments.

A side-on cut-through of a museum, showing six rooms. — I'm already stealing lost cultural artifacts on my Retroid Pocket 6.

Relooted

Everyone who has watched Indiana Jones or played Tomb Raider has had the idea: what if instead of stealing from foreign historical sites, we were taking back plundered artifacts from museums and repatriating them to their origins? Relooted is exactly that: a 3D sidescroller from a South African developer

13 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Finally, a car mechanic sim where your mates do all the work

Jonty and Brendy "team up" in Car Service Together

"There's nothing WRONG with the brakes on this thing, you fucker!"

I raise a car on the pneumatic lift and ignore Jonty's angry outbursts from across the garage. He has been working on that ancient red banger for a while now, swearing to himself the whole time. I raise my own four-wheeled task a little higher on the lift, pop off the oil cap and drain all the dark car bile into a funnel. Simple. Car Service Together is a good old-fashioned early access co-op jankfest, and even better when you have a car-obsessed friend to do all the hard jobs.

"This customer is getting charged 200 bucks for wasting my time," mutters Jonty.

I patiently change an oil filter.

"It's absolute bullshit that you have to take the spacer and the caliper out to change brake pads."

A red car awaits service on the floor of the garage as Jonty's character inspects a button. — Jonty knows his wipers from his windscreens - a real professional.

I lower the car on my lift and fill it up with new oil. My job is done. I saunter over to Jonty, who's still struggling with the rusty bolts on the wreck in front of him. If there was a button in Car Service Together that let me arrogantly wipe

13 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Game-Themed 2026 Wellness Teams For Great Prosperity

Let game designers guide us

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 episode is a Premium instalment for paying subscribers, which means we can abandon our already tenuous grasp on current events and succumb to the intoxication of high concept. This week: as the world lurches into self-improvement at the start of the year, which videogame characters would we choose to coach us into living better?

Total Playtime: Game-Themed 2026 Wellness Teams For Great Prosperity

0:00

/3228.6366

You can see the picks of Brendy, Nate and myself below, and you can listen to the episode to hear our reasoning. Alice was away this week, but wished to make clear that she considered our answers poorly- thought-out and also that her choices would be Aloy off of Horizon Zero Dawn, Officer Dooley from The Darkside Detective, and that posh one off of Final Fantasy XV.

Fitness

Jonty: Ezio from Assassn's Creed

Brendy: Kiryu Kazuma from Yakuza

Nate: Schelemeus from Hades II

Motivation

Jonty: Skelly off from Hades

Brendy: ~~Little Lion from Skin Deep~~ GLaDOS from Portal

12 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Quarantine Zone: The Last Check makes me feel dead inside

Sorry mate, we're full

The seed at the heart of this game is the same as Papers, Please: you're manning a checkpoint and deciding who to let in. In this case, it’s for a zombie epidemic, so the checking is of symptoms and luggage rather than paperwork, and it’s all in full 3D, and the act of checking is merely the first step in what turns out to be a lot of different tasks and challenges which feel like they have been steadily layered on top of something that would have been more engaging had it been simpler. Instead, you get a busywork lifesim that’s surprisingly short on character, at least for the handful of hours I played it.

It all begins with triaging each person through the door. Your choices aren’t simply pass or reject; you have to send people to the safety of camp, the quarantine zone or the incinerator. In what turns out to be an early symptom - pun not intended - of the game’s problems, this is a choice with no emotional weight whatsoever. Occasionally you’ll get a fleeting word of thanks or uncertainty as they’re escorted to the killing chamber,