Jank (Page 2)

23 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Reviews

If you want to explore a strange city, go play Moves Of The Diamond Hand

Cosmo D, as I live and breathe

I am $999 in debt and I may be going insane, but at least my pockets are full of sandwiches. You too may attain bread-based nirvana if you play Moves Of The Diamond Hand, a new dice-rolling RPG from Cosmo D, although you don't need to follow me into the deathspiral of bankruptcy. I just enjoy becoming insolvent in any game that gives me the chance. My granny used to say: "They can't put you in jail for debt". She had roughly nine billion children to feed and I do not, but part of me carries her philosophy to the grave. And indeed past the grave! Into videogames.

But before I explain debt to you, I should explain this entire game. This is impossible, because it is a Cosmo D game. I'll settle for the basics.

You arrive first-personally via subway train to Off-Peak City. It is the middle of an intense mayoral race, with everyone in town talking about three candidates. One is a clone who will fall to pieces if he doesn't have his companion fish robot with him at all times. Another is a former boy band member with a dodgy energy drink sponsorship. The third

22 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Questions

Can a game be 'so bad it's good'?

I'm asking but I already know

One day, as we all sat around in our splintered cyberlimbo slurping up the feeds and making absolutely no effort to better ourselves, a reader called Akwan entered the chat channel of Jank's subscriber-only Discord like a quiet ghost with a stinking fish carcass. "Just out of curiosity," they said, with the tone of somebody who may or may not know the grenade they are holding has zero pins. "Does anyone here have a computer game they think is 'so bad that it's good'? I've seen movies I think fall in that category but no computer game comes to mind."

Suddenly, everyone woke up.

I enjoy the forum-post-as-conversational-pipe-bomb, and this instantly qualified. When you think of "so bad it's good" movies you might think of big dumb fun in a vintage Arnie movie, or cult stinker The Room. This kind of movie is easy enough to identify even if it's impossible to draw the line at any specific point. Sometimes just a concept is enough (Snakes On A Plane, Sharknado) but in many instances it is all down to the dialogue and the delivery of that dialogue.

I will never stop telling people how good Ace Combat 7 is, and

21 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Defence of the clones

From GridWars to Clone Hero, copying software isn't always evil - and can be worth celebrating

I browse the Nintendo eshop from time to time, checking on new releases. The games on there that make me feel the grubbiest aren't the hentai jigsaws; those, at least, are honest. It's the clones. "Peak: The Adventure Begins", for example, seems designed specifically to be mistaken for Peak, the co-op climbing game currently unavailable on the Switch. It feels like a trick, and from the screenshots it looks like a poor imitation.

I don't always feel that way about clones, however. In 2005, the Xbox 360 was released, and with it Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. It was an unlikely killer app. Originally a minigame playable during loading screens in Bizarre Creations' Project Gotham Racing 2, Retro Evolved turned the twin-stick shooter into a standalone game available via the brand new Xbox Live Arcade, and its rippling neon and frenetic combat sold the promise of HD gaming a lot better than Kameo: Elements Of Power.

At the time, everyone around me was score-chasing in Retro Evolved. I worked on a PC games magazine and we coveted the game.

Enter Canadian developer Marco Incitti, who used game making software Blitz Basic to create GridWars, a near-copy of Geometry Wars with a

19 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I read less than normal this past week, which I will pin on my being busy, but I still have several worthy articles for you. And then I reached deep into the recesses of my memory to hoist out something old and forgotten, alongside a little sermon. Read on.

I wrote something recently - here, I guess? - about loving Gamespy's pre-release developer diaries for the original Black & White, which were written by the team themselves. For Eurogamer, Lewis Gordon interviewed some of those original developers about the creation of the game's creature AI. I would not trust Molyneux's self-mythology, and yet I delight in reading anything about this particular game. A conundrum.

The creature, which set Evans on a trajectory from the Lionhead office in Guildford to the rarefied corridors of Google DeepMind in London, began as just a few simple scribblings by Molyneux on a piece of A4 paper. "I thought, let's do a game with an AI agent in it," says Molyneux, toking intermittently on a vape from the office of his current studio, 22Cans. "We wanted to explore the idea of morality, and focus that morality through this entity - the creature.

18 Apr 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Rockstar money

This week in PC gaming

Jank this week had an unplanned theme of "solitude". It began with Graham and Brendy outlining the best first-person single-player PC game levels, which is the sort of overly-specific list we can do round these SEO-free parts, but it was all for nothing because they didn’t include a single Arkane level. This is what happens when I’m too busy to contribute to the lists; I have failed you, the reader, and will do better in future.

Nic Ruben stayed solo to tour single-player extraction shooters, Graham was pursued by a giant centipede, and Brendy reviewed Anthology of a Killer two years after it released, which is another thing we can do when there is nobody to stop us. Thanks to all who’ve backed the site and enabled this. On Total Playtime we discussed vintage sexualisation controversies, recent Microsoft controversies, and the very real although regrettably long-odds prospect of a Duck Tales extraction shooter.

Out there in the wider world, after Rockstar got hacked and was remarkably “yeah whatever” the hackers released the data early, revealing to a scandalised world how much money GTA Online allegedly makes and how much Red Dead Online doesn’t.

18 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Reviews

Review: Anthology of the Killer

I don't need an excuse to do this but I've got one anyway

How late can one review a game? Pointless question, I don't care to hear your answer. Anthology Of The Killer has been out on PC for a while, but it was released on the Nintendthing and Player's Station V this week, bringing the comedy crime caper to the respective audiences of baffled children and tired parents who've forgotten they even have a subscription to PS Plus. This act launches the game back into what we may generously call the Public Eye. Ow! Poor eye.

This gives me the perfect opportunity to finally do what I neglected to do when the game came out two entire years ago (oh no time's inexorable stomp etc etc). That is to say: here follows a non-thorough yet official evaluation of thecatamites' comedy slasher. The video game review continues to be a relevant form.

BB converses with a voice from the audience as she moves through corridors made of curtain.

If you are new to this developer's homebrew bafflements, fear not. Anthology is as good a jumping in point as any. This is a mechanistically simple game of walking about and looking at things until you feel one emotion or another, I won't dictate to you which. BB is a zine maker in a city of terrible murders. Every episode sees

17 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

I've got family visiting, which means I likely won't spend much or any time gaming this weekend. You might be lonesome, however, and what better salve for familial loneliness than a Dad game, of which we've got three flavours this week: a '90s throwback management sim; a blockbuster about showing a surrogate daughter the wonders of the world; and a game about golf.

Tell us what you are playing in the comments, Dad game or otherwise.

Some folks with torches in a medieval town hold leaflets and look confused. — I hope Sintopia is funny, but it might just be sarcastic. Like yer da.

Sintopia

This looks to be inspired by the Bullfrog greats of old, in that it places you in charge of Hell Incorporated. You construct the underworld to turn a profit by punishing souls, while simultaneously using God game-style powers in a pastoral overworld to keep your machinery fed with new sinful denizens. This also means its cheeky sense of humour might cause me to groan myself into the afterlife, but I appreciate that it's not just another 1:1 Dungeon Keeper successor.

A robot gets blasted with electricity as the player, young girl on his back, watches. — No horror but plenty of conflict in Capcom's latest. Like yer da.

Pragmata

Capcom's latest third-person action thingy, and therefore the kind of game I might normally consider

17 Apr 2026 By Nic Reuben Cargo Hunters

My un-lonely jaunt through singleplayer extraction shooters

Who needs friends?

Cargo Hunters is a dead game, although not in the way someone itching to jig in the ashes of another Concord might use the term. No gleeful sloptubers have thrust the Black Spot into its hands by declaring it cooked in a needling video thumbnail, nor paraded dismal Steam charts as cheerfully as if those charts showed falling rates of leprosy.

But it is dead. An extinction event has left behind the furnishings of a game world designed for humans to share silly, bright little stories spun from emergent scrapes, but I will never meet another human for as long as I play.

This is fine and good. Cargo Hunters was born dead. Or, it might be better to say that Cargo Hunters is playing dead, its population of robots with human names mimicking disconnection from a server that was never there to begin with. You load in. You saunter-sneak towards objectives. You unload precious ammunition. You try to avoid fire but take some anyway. You realise you've overreached and run to the extraction point as fast as you can on two exploded legs. Alerted enemies screech and whirr like dial-up modems protesting their own obsolescence. Post-excursion results