Jank (Page 2)

07 Apr 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

The Mass Effect Andromeda prequel has one thing to do, and does it badly

Toiling for Initiative

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 to bring their premium episodes to our paying subscribers - but we’re making this episode free to all.

Text Adventure is Total Playtime’s videogame book club, in which we read a videogame novelisation and try very hard to like it. In this episode, first released to Patrons last year, we were joined by RPS’s Edwin Evans-Thirlwell to read Mass Effect Andromeda: Nexus Uprising, the first of three novels about Bioware’s ill-fated sequel and the first chronological instalment, telling as it does the story of how the wheels came off the Andromeda Initiative well before Messrs. Ryder showed up at the start of the game. That means it’s the first Text Adventure book that isn’t forced to slavishly reproduce the events of the game, an advantage it proceeds to squander at some length.

Text Adventure - Mass Effect Andromeda Nexus Uprising

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The end goal is right there in the title: the uprising on the Nexus space station, the aftermath of which greets you at

06 Apr 2026 By Jim Rossignol Feature

Hunt: Showdown is still showing other extraction shooters how it's done

Hunting down an old timer

Sure, these fresh gunslingers have a lot going for them. Jonny Embark and Bungie The Kid both shoot from the hip and they certainly put on a show. Those young guns make a lot of noise. But it's the quiet, gnarly old gunfighter you should really fear. That guy sat on the porch with a distant look like he has seen too much? The old timer chewing something he pulled out of his horse? He's the one to pay attention to. Because he survived.

The survival of Hunt Showdown is not simply the survival of players as they escape with characters unmurdered from its (thankfully crafting-free) first-person extraction game, but also in the title's remarkable ability to persist and grow over many years in a world where most multiplayer efforts are quietly taken out in the yard and shot. In the deadly corral of a hit-driven hobby the master has modestly abided, and in the year of our lord 2026 Hunt is not simply one of the most impressive and competently designed extraction games, it also has a fairly good claim on being one of the best multiplayer shooters ever made. As a veteran of the old times myself, I

05 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. If you're reading this, then you've survived both the clocks going forward and April Fool's day, two events designed explicitly to kill the exhausted and the middle-aged. Your reward is this long weekend of rest, relaxation and reading about some of the best writing about videogames from the past week.

It was nice of PC Gamer to write some fan fiction about us, with Jeremy Peel producing an ode to eurojank, both the "wonky yet wonderful projects of yesteryear, and their modern successors".

In the same way, ‘eurojank’ is an insult well-meant. On the face of it the term appears to condemn a whole continent's games as laughably buggy and low-budget. But speaking as a proud European, who has had the privilege to spend their working life flying to Frankfurt and Ghent and Uppsala to meet studios punching above their weight, I can tell you that eurojank—a term thrown around often in PC gaming circles in the early 2010s—is a byword for ambition.

Games like Balatro, Luck Be A Landlord and Raccoin don't literally let you bet your money away, but they and many other games have used gambling as inspiration for everything from aesthetics

04 Apr 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Beetle hats

This week in PC gaming

Another week has passed. What did we learn? Graham learned that Screamer is not good good but it's interesting and should be encouraged. He and I learned that Brendy should not play extraction shooters or anything involving monetary games of chance via our all-text Let’s Play of Marathon, part of Jank’s innovative media strategy of pivoting from video (although there are some animated GIFs, which are permitted). Bendy debuted his new Living in Sim column, and cherished how the dreamlike weirdness of Lucid Blocks is like Minecraft with the mystery restored. And on Total Playtime, I forgot my microphone which meant the others were left unsupervised and invoked the dread name of MrBeast.

Out in the PC gaming world at large, it was April Fools Day which of course meant Corporate Fun. IGN has a list of the ”best videogame jokes” which I cannot help but put into quotation marks, although even my black and joyless heart was lifted by the prospect of putting hats on the beetles in Hunt: Showdown, which is currently in the live game and will hopefully endure.

In more good-ish news Shinji Mikami’s new studio got bought by the Stellar

04 Apr 2026 By Alice Bell Podcast

Total Playtime: MrBeast Big Naturals

Plus: mining sexual tension

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 we have fun (for a given value of fun) discussing Epic's mass layoffs. They got rid of a thousand actual people, for what I think are very vague reasons, i.e. Fortnite is somehow not making enough money. This seems like an impossible circumstance. Fortnite is basically a printing press that produces sheets of dollar bills with Tim Sweeney's face on.

Total Playtime: MrBeast Big Naturals

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Maybe he should stop trying to make a shop that most people don't use because its UI is still really bad and annoying. Why isn't there a half decent way to sort the games I have? Why does the application act like me asking it to order my game library in order of purchase is a task of the same difficulty as God asking Abraham to, like, seriously murk Isaac?

We also discuss Sony's dynamic price testing, which sees the return of a much beloved beans metaphor. This, in turn, leads to an extended

03 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

This isn't just a weekend, it's a Mega Weekend. That means many of us around the world have both today and Monday off work, and need games worthy of filling such a bountiful gift of free time.

I've got three suggestions for what you could play, but share your own intentions in the comments below.

Two women talk to each other. One, named Alo, says, "It's hard but also... brings back memories." — I'm sure this is all as peaceful as it appears and nothing bad will happen.

Fishbowl

"Fishbowl is a narrative game about dreams, grief, and hope," reads its Steam description, but you can probably tell that much from the screenshot above. This sits somewhere on the spectrum between To The Moon, Undertale, Yumi Nikki and Omori, with cheerful pixel art paired with inky dark voids. I feel like real life as enough inky dark voids as it is, but I know many who eat these games up.

A watery shockwave circles outwards from the player, hitting monsters that surround him, in a land of pink seas and green fields. — There's colour and spectacle in this Survivors-like that makes me want to play it.

Temtem: Swarm

For about three weeks in 2022, creature collecting and battling in Temtem was the hottest game in town, as finally the PC had something to offer those with a Pokémon itch. The excitement didn't last, but its developers continued to update the

02 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

The lost wonder of Minecraft comes back in Lucid Blocks

It's Notch your usual crafting game

A hideous being stands in front of me, with a fleshy body rendered fuzzy through heavy dithering, and a cracked spherical head with the unsettling happy face of 1970s hippy logo. "O son of man," says the monster. "What lies ahead is a withering carcass. A bloated festering limbo, in which your soul will decay for all eternity."

The creature neglects to mention that this purgatory is a lot like Minecraft.

Lucid Blocks is a crafty block-bashing game about not knowing what fresh hell this is. You are very likely dead, or possibly just extremely asleep. The surreal world that forms around you is, like Minecraft, procedurally generated from a seed - in this case, a single word. You crumble blocks, gather them to your hotbar, and plop them down. There is some end goal, the creature tells you, but only in "oblivion" does it exist.

Remember your first steps into the world of Minecraft? I do. It was 2010 and I was crashing in a friend's spare room as the Yorkshire winter rendered us all desperate for ale. Minecraft was an escape into a blocky dimension where you could build a far more affordable home,

01 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith Marathon

What we talk about when we talk about running (in Marathon, while playing Marathon)

Let's try to convince Brendy that Bungie's shooter isn't all about dopamine

Last week, Brendy explained his feelings about Marathon, Bungie's new extraction shooter. He didn't like it, arguing it was merely "going double-or-nothing on the simple psychological and adrenal hacks that define [the] genre".

Sounds like something we should all play together, thought Jonty and Graham. So we did. Will we be able to convince Brendy that there's more to Marathon than gambling and barcodes, or will we all repeatedly die in a prefab outbuilding while pathologically refusing to watch the lore videos? The following chat has been edited for length and clarity and to remove roughly nine of the times we died.

[Graham and Brendy are on a run in Perimeter, Marathon's starting map. Brendy needs to smash a lot of windows. Graham needs to destroy an antenna.]

Graham: I don't necessarily disagree with anything you said specific to Marathon.

Brendy: You just disagree with something I said that was probably a big generalisation.

Graham: I think you were generalising about maybe multiplayer games quite a lot. I mean, you conceded yourself that you play games for distraction, but a lot of the time it sounded as if you were saying that repetitive multiplayer experiences are fundamentally less valuable