Jank (Page 14)

20 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

The sun is shining in Brighton, which means my appetite for going outside has returned and my appetite for playing games has greatly dimmed. Luckily I have no available friends nearby this weekend, and so I shall be inside playing videogames anyway.

What of you, our attractive and popular readers? Tell us if and what you're playing in the comments below.

Beavers on ziplines, some of which are robots, float over farms full of lush crops. — I hope these beavers have union protections.

Timberborn

Initially launched in Early Access in 2021, this colony sim features sandbox building and water physics, allowing you to construct vast, hydroelectrically-powered cities of lumber with your populace of beavers. This week brought a 1.0 update, which changes the art and tutorial, adds tools to automate the operation of your city, and smooths the creation of mods. Top stuff.

Some peasants cross a bridge to enter through a stone gate and into a city surrounded by trees and a wooden fence. — Pencils were so big in medieval times.

Going Medieval

Initially launched in Early Access in 2021, this colony sim features sandbox building and deep citizenry management, allowing you to construct vast cities of stone with your populace of needy settlers. This week brought a 1.0 update, which changes the tutorial, adds new endgame objectives among other content, and smooths the management of your many workers. Top stuff.

Lots of baseball player headshots littered in formation across a baseball field. — Pure

19 Mar 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

I want more backstabs in Slay The Spire 2's co-op mode

This is why people don't play games with me

When you come across a treasure chest in Slay The Spire 2, it pops open with the goody-bestowing effervescence of a piñata, a relic appears, and life is good. But what if two relics appeared? What if, as you extended your pointy-fingered hand to grab 'em, a second slinky arm came jutting into view to poke you and contest your choice. It is your brother's arm, and he has selected the same shiny trinket you would like. The hands shake violently and a showdown begins. In the deepest, dankest dungeons of this surreal realm, there is only one way to settle this.

You do rock, paper, scissors.

I've already praised the additive joys of Slay The Spire 2 - its fancy boss fights, tricksy minibosses, and the new doom-fuelled reaper character all please me greatly. Like me, you will be forgiven for shrugging off the sequel as a kind of roid embiggened remake, as if mere iteration is not a satisfactory approach for the godfather of all the card-based commupance we've endured for the last decade. It is good. And it has one more Strike up its sleeve: co-op card-slinging.

18 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Reviews

Lost And Found Co. review (of the YouTube videos I watched alongside it)

It could have lost the plot, and maybe I have

Lost And Found Co. is Where's Wally with a mouse pointer. You peer into orthographic worlds and you long to live within them: bustling city streets filled with colourful stores, buskers, and cute cats; a cluttered house that looks like it's fallen out of the pages of Kyoichi Tsuzuki's Tokyo Style; a park, a jungle, a swamp, a convenience store, an island bar, a cat cafe.

The game's objective is that you find a given list of items in each location to bring notoriety back to a shrine goddess and win a popularity contest against an evil corporate president. My objective, however, is to dissociate of an evening while watching YouTube videos on a second screen. So let's appraise Lost And Found Co. in how it enables my goals.

Video 1: Episode 43 by Quest For The Best

I haven't watched this anime and never will.

Second screens have been a commonplace part of PC gaming for decades, and today people refer to certain releases as "podcast games". It's certainly always been a regular part of how I play games. I used to watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer on an adjacent television while

17 Mar 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

I didn't think Slay The Spire needed a sequel. That was dumb

I am Doom-pilled

When Slay The Spire 2 was announced, I honestly didn't feel the need for it. The first game - deckbuilder of all deckbuilders - spawned a torrential smorgasbord of inspirants that has for years inflamed Steam's guts. If you really wanted Slay The Spire But More, you only had to put your hand into those guts and pull out any one of the dozens of disciples and see if they put a sufficiently intriguing twist on the formula. Monster Train. Griftlands. Roguebook. Fights In Tight Spaces. StarVaders. It remains a feast out there for rummagers of roguelike card wreckers. I didn't think there was much a Slay The Spire sequel could do to rekindle my feverish obsession that any of these games couldn't.

I stare now into the beady eyes of a gigantic crab with full knowledge of my inadequacies. What a fool I am.

I will admit much of the giddiness comes from being intimately familiar with the rhythm of play already. I know the playstyle of the Silent (the returning skull-faced poisoner from the first game) better than I know the crannies of my own bathroom. I understand the push and pull of cardy combat

16 Mar 2026 By Alice Bell Reviews

Esoteric Ebb review

A smart, funny puzzle game in RPG clothing

I have heard Esoteric Ebb described as Discworld Elysium, which is useful to give you an initial sketch. It's a tale of political intrigue amongst rival factions in a city about to boil over, as you, a hapless detective, find yourself in the middle of an investigation that could change everything. But, crucially, it's all fantasy themed and it's really funny. It's not as funny as Pratchett, mind you. But I'm monstrously protective of the man and his work, and am tempted to dock points from anything where people draw a comparison, out of spite. So maybe it is as funny as him; it's certainly much funnier than most games that try to be funny at all.

You're gallivanting around Norvik, a place with a map larger than you'd think, art more beautiful than you asked for, and a soundtrack better than you, you lowly sinner, deserve. Norvik is a human city days away from its first ever election. An already fraught situation was enfraughtened further when a local tea shop exploded. It was a) the meeting point for local radicals and b) on land that belongs to the city's goblins.

15 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. My elbows hurt, as they often do in the mornings of late. This has now crossed the rubicon from "oh I slept weird again" to "oh this is some sort of new repetitive strain injury, isn't it." Let's look on the bright side: I now know the word "cubital" and it's a delight to say aloud. Try it. I run my cuticles along by cubital in my cubicle at work. Let's look for other new words by perusing some fine writing about videogames (and beyond) from across the week.

Almost every paragraph of Sam Henri Gold's post about the MacBook Neo is deliciously quotable. I had no interest in the device itself, but this is about what it feels like to be young and finding yourself through a computer.

Yes, you will hit the limits of this machine. 8GB of RAM and a phone chip will see to that. But the limits you hit on the Neo are resource limits — memory is finite, silicon has a clock speed, processes cost something. You are learning physics. A Chromebook doesn’t teach you that. A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and

14 Mar 2026 By Brendan Caldwell

Jank Mail: Do you requiem what I told you yesterday?

This week in PC gaming

Good afternoon. Jonty, the usual author of Jank Mail, is away on a business trip. He is at the Game Developers Conference in the Weimar Republic of America, interviewing games industry people and typing up their words with bloodshot, jet-lagged eyes for his other, proper job. Disgusting.

That means I'm in charge of the weekly newsletter. I promise not to talk about hacking sims and skateboarding and Tekken. Here's what we've been up to at Jank, and what's been going on in the broader world of video and/or games.

First, here at Jank Dot Cool I finally completed Resident Evil Requiem and wrote a review. The short version is that it's dumb fun, stacked with characterful zombies, and full of fan service. My brother describes it as the Resident Evil equivalent of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and I cannot dispute this theory. I guess we should have expected as much with "Requiem" in the title.

Grace from Resident Evil Requiem cradles Emily in the glow of a fire with a pained expression. — I've started to use the word "requiem" like a verb, to bewilder friends and family. "Have you requiemed your doctors appointment?" "Sorry, I think you're misrequiembering."

We also discovered the font it uses for the

13 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Give me your comments, I need them to live

This week felt like a merciful relief when compared to the machinegun of new releases at the beginning of March. Still, perhaps your hunger is not yet sated. Perhaps you wish for more new games, games about mending teapots, making spells, and murdering monsters.

What a coincidence, here are some games that meet those specific criteria. Let us know what you are playing in the comments down below.

How about a cosy back-to-basic life sim but it's about moving away from streaming services in favour of neatly maintaining the tags on your locally stored mp3 collection?

Piece By Piece

Repair items for animal folk by jigsawing them back together, then use the money you make to decorate your shop. There's some obvious Animal Crossing inspiration here (the fonts, the UI, the character designs), but gardening and painting aside, it seems much more focused on the soothing loop of shop management.

What a magnificent beast. Let's kill it.

Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection

I've never managed to get into a Monster Hunter game, but the Stories spin-off series seems like my most likely route in at this point. Twisted Reflection looks like it