Jank (Page 3)

08 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

It costs £7 to boot orcs off a cliff

It's all kicking off

Fatekeeper is deeply unfinished. Ladders warp you from the bottom to the top, menu items are plastered with "WIP", and there's an NPC smithy who hammers on steel without emitting a single "klang" sound effect. There is an big lizard with a saddle, but you cannot ride it (it says "Press E to Pet" the megalizard but there's no petting animation). In so many ways, this sword-swinging first-person RPG is a perfect example of eurojank released in a state of panic. I cannot honestly recommend it, notwithstanding the following counterpoints:

It has a kick button; it is seven pounds.

Well, nine pounds if the launch deal has run out by the time you've read this. This is basically Dark Messiah of Might and Magic dragged kicking and screaming and on fire into the light of 2026. It is made by a small team that have somehow maintained a blockbuster studio's backbreaking passion for placing thousands of tiny, hyperrealistic pebbles. I am not joking, it is obsessed with perfectly rendering tiny rocks. Also, you have a talking rat as a best friend.

It is not a polished game, except in the way that

07 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I am hosting a sleepover for three ten-year-olds and so there will be no lie-in for me today. As I write this now, on Saturday, it's not yet even clear whether there will be sleep for me. That doesn't mean we can't heroically gather some fine writing about videogames (and much more), though.

For PC Gamer, Rick Lane tells the story of the making of Unreal 2. I remember that it was initially enormously ambitious, but I did not know (or did not remember) that it effectively wanted to be Mass Effect.

Verdu wanted to create an all-new Unreal experience, one that leant harder into the cinematic sci-fi of the original. "I hatched a vision for a game that, rather than you just being constrained to one world, it would have this story device that allowed you to move between worlds, and that became a spaceship," he explains. "We were going to create a little simulation of a world on a ship, and it would have these characters that move around, that you have these interesting conversations with, and those characters were going to develop along with the story,

05 Jun 2026 By Alice Bell Podcast

Total Playtime: A Majestic Herd of Max Paynes

Premium episode for the premium god

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05 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Tell us what you're playing below

We have once again dragged our nets along the sea floor of videogames to trawl for new releases worth bringing back to port, but for once our catch is bordering on paltry. Perhaps the videogames were simply too small to be caught in our nets, or perhaps the industry's videogame farmers thought it unwise to release alongside the marketing bonanza of Summer Game Fest, which continues over the weekend.

In any case, there are still some interesting new games you could play. Tell us what you are playing in the comments.

Characters, that look like the guys from Peak, drive trucks around a warehouse covered in paint or slime. — Now you know what was at the top of that mountain.

Crashout Crew

The latest game from Aggro Crab, fresh from their success as the co-developers of Peak. Crashout Crew has a similar art style and focus on co-op slapstick, but here your and your buddies are fulfilling orders in a warehouse that's really just an escalating series of physics arenas. A little bit Peak, a little bit Overcooked.

A group of ghostly figures in fancy old fashioned clothes sit around a drawing room. — Guests 1-6.

The 7th Guest Remake

I never played The 7th Guest, but it was practically a permanent fixture for about a decade of PC gaming magazines. This remake uses volumetric filming techniques to produce

03 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Character Select

Thumper beetle vs SkiFree Yeti

Let endless battle persevere

Welcome to season one of Character Select. How many seasons will there be? Only one person knows the answer, and he is on paternity leave.

This week's hyperfictional showdown is as much thought experiment as battle for survival. Step this way, unstoppable force, let me introduce you to my good friend, immovable object. It's the Beetle from Thumper versus the Yeti from SkiFree. One of them will never stop hunting you and always kills its quarry. The other is a rhythmically violent intradimensional insect capable of passing through realms of consciousness at the speed of thought. This is the Large Hadron Collider of "who'd win" scenarios. The laws of physics hang in the balance. It's now or it is never now. Select your character!

The case for the Beetle from Thumper

Have you seen somebody perform a perfect run in Thumper? It is like watching a migraine achieve sentience and launch into space. There is no species on this planet that can compete with this... thing. I briefly thought about putting Sonic the Hedgehog into this fight against the Yeti, but the blue bozo is always stopping to refuel on chilli dogs or talk to a

02 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

The adventures of hat guy and tutorial gal

The Adventures Of Elliot: The Millennium Tales seems initially bland, but its demo won me over

Some people's names can hold up to being put in the title of a videogame or movie, but I'm not sure "Elliot" is one of them. The protagonist of Square Enix's next HD-2D game is introduced by one NPC as a man of good character, although they "will admit he has his quirks." I assume that's a reference to Elliot's red hat, which seems to be the the only notable part of his personality.

The Adventures Of Elliot: The Millennium Tales might be as bland as its main character, but I think I'm fully onboard anyway after playing its demo.

Elliot is an adventurer in a fantasy world overrun by beastmen. The remaining human population are safe inside a medieval city's walls thanks to a magical shield maintained by the princess. Adventurers are those few who travel beyond the walls to explore and find supplies, and in Elliot's case to earn money he can use to care for the children in the orphanage in which he was raised. His name could have been called Hero McDogooder and the game name would have been better.

This has the same art style

01 Jun 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Gabe Newell’s new yacht enables him to host LAN parties on the set of an immersive sim

A troubling look into a different world

In my life I have attended perhaps five LAN parties in total, and one of those doesn’t really count because it was just lugging my 486 over to a friend’s house so we could play Quake deathmatch. Two people is not enough for a LAN party, in the same way that it’s not enough for an orgy: you need enough people for it to feel like a crowd, and coincidentally they also have to be OK with being sweaty and very close to people in a domestic setting that wasn’t really designed for it. (Also, everybody brought something alarmingly large and brightly coloured from home.)

Nowadays LAN parties feel somewhat anachronistic, replaced by the internet: there are still larger-scale events like Epic.Lan or bring-your-own corners of PAX, but bringing PCs together in one place feels like a dated relic of a former age. I was delighted, therefore, to belatedly discover that Gabe Newell has included LAN parties in the spec for his latest $500m megayacht, built by the firm he recently purchased and kitted out to serve his marine research enterprise.

People playing Counter-Strike in a large conference room in a luxury yacht with full-length windows on either side. — A LAN party, at sea. (Image credit: Oceanco/Guillaume Plisson)

31 May 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Links to good words about videogames

Good morning, videogames. I have spent much of my spare time this week spring cleaning, and I'm not done yet. Before we begin another day of scrubbing, lets stay in bed a little longer and enjoy some fine words about games.

For Teen Vogue, Nicole Carpenter asked, why are thin bodies the default in games? It's for the expected reasons, but Carpenter speaks to actors, animators and motion capture experts to explain the challenges and all the ways it's wholly achievable.

Problems arise when there's a big difference in the skeleton of an actor and the body they're being tied to. Drop a short actor's skeleton into a tall character's body and you've got a "spatial problem," Counsell says. "A four-foot tall character takes five steps forward, they've traveled a few meters," he says. "A ten-foot tall character takes four steps forward, they've traveled tens of meters." A short character with an unnaturally long stride, or a tall character with tiny, fast steps, is just not going to look right.

I have yet to start 007: First Light, which means I am yet to read any reviews of