Jank (Page 2)

16 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

The Witch's Bakery demo got me out of a gaming slump

The demo is available now ahead of release in August

I've been feeling sort of listless lately. I want to be deeply engrossed in something and I'm currently not. My attempts to burrow inside a new game have been rebuffed several times in a row, and by the fourth or fifth time I abandon a new game within the first 30 minutes, I start to lose the will to try another. Book lovers talk a lot about being in a "reading slump", a minor malady that's often resolved by reading something short or re-reading an old favourite. When in a gaming slump, I often do the opposite, seeking out larger and more labyrinthine games as my desperation for absorption grows. This is a mistake.

The Witch's Bakery arrived at just the right moment. The demo, available in the ongoing Steam Next Fest, does not require any burrowing on the part of the player. Its delights are on the surface.

I mean, just look at it. Looking at it is most of the pleasure.

Lunne is a witch who has moved to Paris to open a bakery with her magical associate, a talking cat named Orio. You control her days and nights: serving customers their desired

15 Jun 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Bad Magpie develops the bad-bird canon with more tools in a weirder world

Angry Bird (singular)

Amid the lavishly detailed third-person gore of the larger summer showcases, the debut of Bad Magpie in the Xbox showcase was a welcome change: a cartoony style, cheery colours and a heartstring-tugging tableau of an injured bird left behind by its flock, with a slightly demonic twist when said bird picked up a burning log and torched its bucolic environment.

Having played it, I can confirm that the game is more or less exactly what it looks like: a mildly unhinged approximation of Untitled Goose Game which gives its titular bird some more inventive puzzles and a series of tools with which to solve them. And there is quite a lot of setting things on fire, too, at least in the section I played.

It quickly becomes apparent that Bad Magpie is a more fantastical affair than House House’s debut. While the goose had a perfectly-animated strut across a perfectly stereotypical English village, the magpie has a relentless hop through a more peculiar setting. Flowers wear beatific smiles, trees wear blank faces, cheery rodents gather to play, and the narrative calls for you to collect meteorite shards for a fallen star, to be delivered

14 Jun 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: The Devil is Always Sexy

Selected highlights of Keigh3

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 late, for which we apologise and blame Geoff Keighley because let's face it, he's the one pulling all the strings these days. Jonty was still sat in meeting rooms in LA when this episode was recorded and Brendy is still doing dad things, so it fell to Alice and Nate to judge the output of a week's worth of game showcases despite really wanting to just talk about their dogs instead.

Thankfully they were both able to struggle through in the face of, once again, entirely too many games. Thrill to Alice's judgement of Geoff Keighley's fashion choices, Nate's denunciation of the crippling lack of ambition in aquarium simulation, and collective theorising on gender division in circus skills. Plus: finally getting a plausible dinosaur survival game, Commander Riker Isolation, and collectibles for a WWI Lego game. Shout out the Pope, you da real Warhammer 40,000 (words).

This episode is free to all, but

14 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. The World Cup is now underway, which means I can spend the next several days complaining that England's opening game is on at a comfortable 9pm BST while Scotland's opening game was on at 2am. Bloody typical, isn't it. No wonder I need a lie-in today, so let's quickly gather some articles about videogames worth reading.

I love Spore, a grand and ambitious everything-game that doesn't quite work, but which is fascinating to play and to read about. For Design Room, Jay Castello interviewed Will Wright and and seven other members of its development team to put together an oral history.

"He was like, I want to do a game about all the things that had to happen for humans to exist, improbability upon improbability upon improbability," says Trottier. "I want people to have an innate, marvelous sense of how amazing it is that we ever happened in the first place. And they'll do it by experiencing one failure after another after another."

For Manifesto Jam 2026, Mike Cook writes what a lot of people need to hear.

THE DREAM OF SELLING GAMES IS KILLING THE DREAM OF MAKING

14 Jun 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: There will be blood

This week, and last week, in PC gaming

There was no Jank Mail last week, for which I apologise: I was in LA for the annual trailer spectacular once called E3, and now being consumed by Geoff Keighley’s glossy rival Summer Game Fest, which incorporates both his own showcase and the adjoining ones that he freely attaches the brand to. I learned many things, and one of them was that it’s not possible for me to attend everything and write any meaningful digest of the contents, so I’m going to bless you with a jumbo roundup today.

Let’s start with what Jank did. Brendy found a game that lets you kick orcs off a cliff and it only costs £7 (total, not per orc). He also sort of reviewed Subnautica 2 by asking game developers how to create a feeling of discovery. Total Playtime planned a videogames zoo, Character Select pitted the Thumper Beetle against the Skifree Yeti and I became increasingly worried that Gabe Newell’s new yacht is the setup for a horror film. Graham was won over by The Adventures of Elliott, before heroically watching most of the showcases and picking out 12 games that give him hope for the

12 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Tell us what you're playing below

After a week of respite, the machinegun of videogame releases has begun firing once more. In fact, it's been joined now by the handgun of demo releases, as June's Steam Next Fest grows nearer. You can expect some writing about our favourites in the days and weeks to come, but for now, here's a handful of full and finished games you could play this weekend.

Tell us what you coulda woulda shoulda been playing in the comments.

A lot of guys with swords run away from a flame-coloured ocean and through a passageway. — Is there 33 here? I'm not counting to find out.

33 Immortals

A co-op hack-and-slasher for 33 players - sort of. In reality, you can play solo or party up with four friends, and then you'll be matchmade with other people in their own parties for large-scale, MMO-style raids, in which you need to coordinate to take down God. Hades seems like an obvious point of comparison to the combat and loop here, but it's also from Thunder Lotus, the makers of Spiritfarer and Jotun.

A woman stands next to a rosebed in front of a thatched cottage, waterfall and trees in the distance. — We may come to regret replacing most of our food crops with roses.

Tales Of Seikyu

Not a part of the Tales Of series of JRPGs, but a

11 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Let us discover a new world

With insight from the developers of Mina The Hollower, Spelunky 2, Citizen Sleeper, and Tales From Off-Peak City

I have discovered a crab that cuts off its own eyes. It was a small moment in the warm waters of Subnautica 2, but it reminded me why I loved the first game so much. This crab has regenerating eyestalks that mimic the anemones of the seabed. "If the stalks grow too long," says a lore blurb about the critter, "the clowncrab will trim them to avoid drawing attention." Every animal has a note like this, earned when you scan them - a growing encyclopedia the player is encouraged to build to help discover the world around them.

In a fluffy way, every game is about discovery - you are finding out the rules of a world as you go along. In a non-fluffy way, some games are shit at this, and others are masterful. Inspired by a single crab, I've spoken to a handful of devs on this topic. How do the makers of Spelunky, Mina The Hollower, Citizen Sleeper, and Moves Of The Diamond Hand make sure their worlds are worth discovering? And do I reckon Subnautica 2 has hit the mark?

"The best thing a game can do to create a

09 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

12 upcoming games that give me hope for the future

Triple-A showcases are the thief of joy, but luckily we secured joy to your belt with a wallet chain

Not-E3 and its exhausting cavalcade of marketing showcases has drawn to a close, leaving behind the hangover of disdain and regret I feel every year. Do I even like videogames anymore? Did I ever? How could anyone possibly appreciate this dour medium? Let me summarise the blockbuster games thus: Coca-Cola announced new Coke flavours for the Coke drinkers, Pepsi announced new Pepsi flavours for the Pepsi drinkers, and those of us in desperate need of a sip of water rasped for it all to end.

Do not, as I almost did, give up hope. The rains will come. In the meantime, I have harvested the morning dew and dug under the dry riverbeds. I have found water in the desert. Here are the only games from Not-E3 that were actually worth your time.

Carcass Clad

I love clunking machinery and a diegetic interface, and I love steering tanks through desolate landscapes. Carcass Clad is about both, as you and your co-op partners operate the cranks and levers of the Yksiö, your Soviet (or Soviet-inspired) tank which has the husks of (mutated?) livestock messily nailed to its armour. That this is also from Wrong Organ, the