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05 Oct 2026 By Sin Vega Reviews

Thousand Hells review

Other hell is people

As readers in the UK will know, there are many hells, and you can and should put together a team to rob powerful figures within them. And such a team would of course be not a spreadsheet of optimal (ugh) builds, but a guessing game of hedged bets and approximate ideas.

Thousand Hells has you lead this team on a journey, first to reach hell at all, then to find and retrieve something, or get agonisingly close before making one too many mistakes and losing everything. But this isn't the arbitrary, timewasting death of the roguelike. This is just that story. It can be dissatisfying, and parts of it can not really make sense. This is at times its big flaw, and at others, where it feels most successful. Are we still saying "same"?

Each game is an adventurous journey followed by a heist, then a shorter but still fraught journey back. Each is also a named plot with a specific target, and could take you to one of four hells (the "thousand" are scene-setting) this time. It's also a new team, including you, the leader.

Handpainted style picture of a settlement set underground, brightly painted. A minigame plays out on the right, with tokens and gamey bits. Text describes the party saying "I'm sorry, friend ghoul, but we don't know the entry toll." The ghoul: "You call me friend? No one ever calls me that." Party: "As travelers in an unfamiliar city we extend friendship to all." Ghoul: "In that case, you may pass, and I forgive you for failing to bring me any sweet, delicious corpse flesh." — This caption is a formal request for Tunnel Ghoul fan art

04 Oct 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. Thanks for all your responses to last week's question about which reviewers have a definable aesthetic taste. My personal opinion is that I don't think there are many good answers to the question, because the realities of modern games media don't provide opportunities for writers to work as critics or with editors long enough to refine their taste and their voice. I'm taking the number of commenters that named designers rather than writers, or writers long-since retired, as a sign you all agree. Don't correct me. Thank god for Sin though, eh? Let's move on to another week of links to articles you might enjoy.

I've wanted to read something in-depth about the booming Pokémon fangame scene for a while. Ana Diaz delivered just that for Fansplaining this week.

The popularity of the fangames themselves attests to the central role they play in the Pokémon fandom, which is massive: Pokémon is estimated to be the highest-grossing media franchise in the world. Fangames have huge audiences; Pokémon Uranium, for example, has reportedly been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. A quick search on YouTube reveals that video

03 Oct 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Oh no, another algorithm

This week in PC gaming

It’s been another week of finely crafted words about PC games on Jank. Graham spoke the hard truth that VR still just doesn’t work, most of the time.

John Wick doesn't have these kinds of problems. John Wick has never died because he was unable to access the gun on his belt because his belt was clipped through the floor while he was crouched. Jack Reacher neither. Jack Reacher has never died because his reality phase-shifted to a living room because his head strayed too close to a Ikea Strandmon footstool.

In the Lie-In, he topped his list of links worth clicking with a plea for favourite critics, which prompted some interesting discussion in the comments and on BlueSky.

Who are the videogame reviewers that, to you, have a definable point of view? I don't mean that you like their work, or that you agree with it. I mean, tell me the writers who have a coherently expressed set of aesthetic principles that they apply, resolutely and consistently, in their work?

Marsh Davies reviewed Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, and found it much more surprising than its appearance or predecessors suggested:

It is a

03 Oct 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

Three for a tenner! Come get yer games. Three for a tenner!

Here's how to recreate the bargain buckets you remember

Consider this: you've just been handed a tenner from your grandmother. She doesn't know what the hell she's doing. She thinks you'll spend it on sweets, or put it in your piggy bank. What a fucking idiot! No, you're going to rummage through the bargain bucket at your local game shop.

Except, oh no, all the game shops are dead. That's okay, Steam is having a sale this week. The correct way to find proper deals in a Steam sale is to create your own bargain bin by fiddling with the dials and sliders of the store's search page, like a coked-up rodent messing with levers in a lab experiment. One of these has got to open the cage, right? No. The cage is capitalism. And you are trapped. The best you can hope for is for cheap videogames to come sliding down the tubes. Let me aid you in this by taking ten pounds (British, valuable, suspicious) and seeing what we could buy in the Steam Autumn sale with granny's cash.

First, let's go to the Global Top Sellers list and crank that price slider all the way down

03 Oct 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Delivered in the tone of Igor

It happened again

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, funded entirely by our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.

Alice and Nate are away this week, possibly because we're talking about layoffs again, chiefly those at Microsoft again. Still, this does spare us from having to tell Nate live on air that an unrevealed Age of Empires game has been cancelled.

Otherwise it's a bit of a bad-news rundown through the extended Xbox universe and into Bungie's recent decision that it's going to spend time on Destiny 2 after all, before Brendy brightens things up with some chat about the cheerily implausible fighter-plane-based fiction of Ace Combat 8. There are also some important tips about carrying car batteries, thus cementing our position as providers of service journalism.

You can listen to the episode right here, or find it in your podcasting app of choice.

Our art is by God Ribbon, our art is by Marsh Davies, our editing is by Alix Attenborough

02 Oct 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

And what we're all playing

Earlier this week I tried to install Ace Combat 8, only to discover that I didn't have space for its 140GB girth on any of my three hard drives. This is a signal that I should play some of the games I've already got installed, many of which were downloaded months ago and never touched. So this weekend I shall be playing a lot of games for 15 minutes and then deleting them forever.

What about you? I humbly petition that this article's commenters are not sufficiently numerous. Tell us what you're playing down below, and then tell all your friends to do the same.

Dicevaders

A colourful grid of icons from which numbers spring. 1,080! 6,226! 1,380!

I had some fun with StarVaders, a turn-based tactics game about buildcrafting against robot enemies that trundle onto a single-screen grid. Dicevaders is set in the same universe but injects dice into its name and systems, with all your build craft and tactical manipulation focused on adjusting your dice and their odds. Starvaders deserved more attention; hopefully Dicevaders gets it.

RetroSpace

A red corridor with a grate floor lit from below, in which stands another insectoid monster.

There have been a handful of BioShock-inspired immersive sims this year, and I confess that a phrase like "disco-punk" makes me want to run a

01 Oct 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Knytt remains a classic

And Brendy is a rockist snob

TVTropes is a malicious force in storytelling, but it occasionally puts a name to something it's useful to name. I like "Flanderization", which is a fun word to say, and the process by which a character, often in a sitcom, becomes a parody of themselves. Named after The Simpsons' Ned Flanders, who warps across seasons from a relatively normal, albeit improbably perfect figure of envy for slothful oaf Homer, into an absurd Christian fundamentalist whose niceness is a pathological disorder.

I find this word useful because I think the same process happens to videogames. Brendy's "self-playing games" can be understood as being at the extreme end of the process: parodies of the entire medium of videogames, mimicking the structure of upgrades and progress in order to deliver dopamine without the fullness of complexity of their original genres.

But Knytt, originally released in 2006, represents an earlier stage of much the same process. Knytt is Flanderized Mario.

This article is free to read, but only thanks to those who subscribe to Jank. Want to support more writing about PC games of the past, present and future?

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In a brief opening cutscene, the nameless and

30 Sep 2026 By Nic Reuben What's On Your Bookshelf?

What's On Your Bookshelf?: Norco's Yuts

"There's a scene of the shambolic protagonist getting destroyed in a game of tennis that converted me."

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to What's On Your Bookshelf? - Jank's bi-weekly chat with a mint-condition, laminated collection of rapidly appreciating game-makers about books.

Every so often, the paper books vs e-readers discourse will spontaneously reheat itself like a malfunctioning MRE. A thorny topic, surely, but consider that if a stray teardrop of sriracha falls on a Kindle page of Zola's Nana, it will then appear on every subsequent page until you wipe it off, creating the effect of an infinite, transient sauce globule echoing through spacetime. Conversely, a hardback copy of Puzo's The Godfather you dribbled marinara on will permanently be your sauce-stained copy of The Godfather, though only on a single, lonely page.

I'd like to think this tells us something important about the nature of something else important, although what exactly, I could not say. Perhaps this week's guest might know? It's only Yuts from Norco and Silenus developers Geography Of Robots! Cheers Yuts - mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

What are you currently reading?

I'm about a quarter of the way into Money by Martin Amis. I read Amis’s collection of book reviews years ago, and have intended to check out his fiction ever since. There's a scene of the shambolic protagonist getting destroyed in a game of tennis that converted me.

The other book on my desk is for research related to our new game, which takes place along Louisiana's coast. Last Days of Last Island by Bill Dixon, about the 1856 hurricane that wiped out a seasonal resort town down here. Dixon does a great job constructing his research into a continuous narrative.

What did you last read?

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