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01 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I have been bone tired all week in a way that I couldn't shake until Friday morning, when I employed the best remedy for such a feeling: I got a haircut. Properly restored, I've been on top of everything ever since. Let's celebrate with some words worth reading this Sunday morning.

I've complained many times that business analysis, or some amateur impression of it, too often replaces arts and culture conversations around videogames among both journalists and the game-playing public. Mikhail Klimentov therefore gets the top spot this week for writing a thing I already agree with on that theme. Not everything is Concord:

A year and a half after its collapse, the prominence of Concord as a cautionary example represents a retreat from talking about games in favor of talking about business and marketing — a sort of rot in the culture. Has a developer successfully sold me on XYZ new game? Did the trailer rollout make sense? What’s the view count on somesuch marketing material? And how will all this redound on player counts and units moved? These aren’t my favorite subjects, and I look a bit askance at people who really care about

28 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

The demos that didn't quite make the cut in this month's Next Fest

Our big pile of leftovers

At least twice a year we feral games journalists rummage through the bins of Steam like malnourished city foxes, looking for the best demos during Next Fest. It is a ritual of survival that we sometimes loftily call an act of curation, as if we are refined museum directors and not a gang of scurrilous weirdoes seeking sustenance from pixels.

The upshot is that you readers get a few recommendations, a short list of cool stuff to keep an eye on. But what about all the demos we played that didn't quite pass our cryptic taste test? Surely that'd be equally useful. A "not all that" list. A "save yourself some time" list. Here are all the leftovers we chewed once and spat out.

Altered Alma

A pixel hero slices an enemy punk in a purple tinted cyberpunk city.

Graham: I feel bad calling this a leftover, because it's a slashy-dashy-grapply metroidvania with a cyberpunk world and dating sim elements, and it feels good to play. It's somewhat reminscent of Iconoclasts, an oft-overlooked but excellent action-platformer. The problem is that the metroidvania genre has become rapidly overstuffed. I haven't finished Silksong yet and I've barely put a dent in MIO: Memories In Orbit, both of which are obviously stellar. From the

28 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Next Fest, Xbox next, Saints No

Plus: your chance to live in Unreal Tournament

The week, and February, is over. What did we learn? We played a bunch of Next Fest demos and so did everybody else until Marathon came out. Brendy commends Airframe Ultra and partially understands Spacefleet: Heat Death, and I revealed that Beyond Words sure is what it looks like. Sin Vega took a late trip to Beatdown City and Brendy continued to develop our #brand by asking some developers to share their best jank.

Out in the wider games industry, the end of Phil Spencer’s reign at Xbox remained a topic of spirited discussion. The takes spanned the usual games community spectrum from “farewell to our saviour” to “good riddance, loser”, alongside a suspiciously comprehensive savaging of Sarah Bond. The most obsequious take was rewarded with an interview with new broom Asha Sharma, in which she reaffirmed a commitment to Xbox without saying what that actually means.

Sharma is at least being commendably transparent about not having Spencer’s gaming chops, which by all accounts would be very difficult without blocking out three days a week for Achievement farming, and says she needs to “learn about the ‘why’” of previous decisions, which is the sort of thing

27 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: The Trials of Anubis

Dead reckoning

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 Patreon episode is another demonstration of our fearless defiance of editorial convention, as we not only run our big quiz of the year in February, but do so by traversing the Egyptian underworld and resolving the gaming-related trials of Anubis.

Total Playtime: The Trials of Anubis

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Thrill as Nate breaks out the voice changer, Alice upgrades her eagle, Brendy challenges Nate on the single worst topic imaginable and we face a surfeit of burning snakes. Truly no other podcast combines questions about sales figures and GTA trailers with an extremely in-depth knowledge of ancient Egyptian belief systems. Which, not to be dismissive of other cultures, are remarkably complicated and a real hassle to navigate when you're simply trying to escape the grip of the underworld.

Plus: asking Shaq what a basketball is, "an enigmatic and barely understandable point in the journey", and the return of a beloved RPS regular. You can listen to the podcast right here on this page, and

27 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

Last week I suggested that you might play the new Styx game, Blades Of Greed. This week, Styx publisher Nacon declared bankruptcy. I guess you didn't listen to me and now you see what happens. Let's try it again.

Here's three games you could be playing this weekend. Let us know what game you're playing instead in the comments.

Harry Kim is asking for your orders, Captain, in a text prompt next to a picture of the USS Voyager. But look, it's not actually Harry Kim. Harry Kim was sucked into space and killed in season two and we replaced him with a different Harry from an alternate universe. Nobody talks about it but our Harry Kim is dead! Don't let Janeway cover up anymore dea-- — I can't explain right now, but that's not the real Harry Kim.

Star Trek: Voyager - Across The Unknown

This survival strategy game is supposedly a "faithful recreation" of the TV series, a very dumb show that I love very much. Presumably this means that the characters aboard the ship die constantly but then are miraculously restored within 44 minutes, their traumatic experiences never to be mentioned again. In fact, I'd be much more inclined to play it if it was more knockabout toybox than Frostpunk misery sim. Here's hoping.

Some magic guys blast fire at an enemy next to a bunch of cornfields and grass. — The use of fire in these fields is deeply irresponsible.

Towerborne

Stoic, makers of The Banner Saga trilogy, return with a new game with similarly gorgeous character designs. There's no turn-based thinkery here, however. This is a co-op action-RPG about biffing big monsters with brawler-style combos. A bit Dragon's Crown? A

27 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

A hoverbike hurtler that always ends in a ragdoll brawl

On your bike, mate

It's Next Fest, so we're sampling as many demos as we can this week. You can download this one here.

If you don't win your race in hoverbike racing game Airframe Ultra, you might at least batter your opponent into submission with a steel pipe in the clunky physics brawl that takes place afterwards. This is, as the following GIFs will prove, a wrenchingly cool-looking racer of the much-dithered retro variety. You speed across the chunky trash textures and dangerously high bridges of a future city where all the coolest kids are into jet engine hooners and grievous bodily harm.

A GIF of a racer in hot pink flying out of a narrow tunnel and coming to a halt against a backdrop of a sci-fi megacity. — Ah, London.

You pick up glowing piles of cash as you rush through narrow passages, storm drains, and busy motorways. Bash a boost button to get some extra oomph, but bash it too much and your airframe will explode. Even going too fast for too long will make your mechacycle overheat and splutter to a grinding halt. You can jab people as you pass them, like in ye olde racing game Motorstorm. Or in my case, you can be punched in the jaw just as you are feeling like the coolest racer in town.

The player lands after a big jump and is struck by an opponent who catches up from behind. — Furious.

That's fine, there'll be time

26 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

Ready to die hot and confused? Here's a hardcore orbital warfare sim

Let them cook (their enemies)

It's Next Fest, so we're sampling as many demos as we can this week. You can download this one here.

Some interstellar navies run out of fuel in the middle of a space battle. I ran out of fuel 51 days before the battle even began. In Spacefleet: Heat Death you are given a map of solar system (well, just the Earth and the moon) and asked to hop from station to station, Lagrange point to Lagrange point, building up a fierce little gang of spacekillers so that you can survive an incoming bunch of baduns. The trouble: it is all presented like you are sitting at a computer workstation in NASA and if you don't know what Delta-V is from years of Kerbal Space Program you may as well put a giant laser to your head right now.

This is a strategy game rooted in hard sci-fi. It's the 23rd century and the Earth is swarmed by filthy spacetrash. You can buy ships and arrange them into fleets to fight or trade with many dirtbag factions - there are missile frigates, laser wielding corvettes, artillery bastards, fuel tankers, cargo haulers. They all look sort of the same, but each

25 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Beyond Words is Scrabble given the Balatro treatment

Spell is other people

It's Next Fest, so we're sampling as many demos as we can this week. You can download this one here.

The Beyond Words demo comes with a prominent but confusing pedigree: it proudly states it’s “from the makers of Goldeneye and Timesplitters” but bears absolutely no relation to either, rendering the association moot to the point of negativity. It’s like emphasising Babe 2: Pig In The City is “from the maker of Mad Max: Fury Road”: factually accurate, and doubtless both benefit from the same hard-won expertise, but you wouldn’t want to leave die-hard fans of either together without supervision.

There is no shooting, sci-fi or even synth music here: it’s Scrabble, and specifically Scrabble given the Balatro roguelike treatment, to an almost embarrassing degree of fidelity. You’re rewarded for placing longer words and using more annoying letters in the standard Scrabble style, but everything after that is overpoweringly reminiscent of LocalThunk’s creation.

You have a set of power cards granting buffs and multipliers, consumable boost cards that level up scores, and a store window at the end of each round to purchase more of both, using coins accumulated according to your remaining