Jank (Page 3)

16 Apr 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Wee Butt Mode

We might get a Duck Tales extraction shooter before GTA 6

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.

In a rare treat this week’s episode is not talking about layoffs, but I contrived to introduce them as additional context for Pete Hines being savagely critical of what happened to Bethesda, so the narrative thread is maintained. Otherwise this is quite a good-natured look at the latest PC gaming happenings, including what turned out to be some extremely inaccurate guesses at what hackers had stolen from Rockstar, and what will doubtless prove to be extremely inaccurate guesses at what’s in Epic’s Disney-character extraction shooter.

Total Playtime Episode 33: Wee Butt Mode

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Other highlights this week include Brendy driving up some hills and becoming troubled by them, Nate establishing himself as our resident Jeff Kaplan correspondent, and the ease with which you can Mandela Event yourself into believing just about any idiotic Gamergate-y conspiracy theory is a real thing because they’re all so ridiculous as to be plausible.

Plus: troublesome dogs, IRL Pope beef, some very ill-advised rake-stepping

14 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

Climb down a hole, pursued by a centipede

Idols Of Ash is about the mastery of space and the horror of time

Spiders don't bother me at all, but centipedes? Centipedes glisten. Centipedes look like worms wearing a crab exoskeleton. Centipedes, wet slick and scurrying, are the perfect organism for sluicing inside small holes and pipes like Eugene Victor Tooms - and as a human being I contain an unfortunate number of small holes and pipes.

Luckily I never need to encounter the giant centipede pursuing me in Idols Of Ash. As long as I can perfectly descend into an impossibly deep well and navigate forgotten caves and crumbling megastructures using nothing but a grappling hook, I'll be just fine. Just fine!

Uh oh.

Idols Of Ash costs $3 from Itch.io and I completed it in an hour or so, much of which was spent clumsily falling to my death. You could go play it in lieu of reading this post, and you should.

Despite my clumsiness and dislike of chitinous arthropods, Idols Of Ash is surprisingly generous. Your health bar is substantial, you can fall further than you expect without taking damage, and there are glowing health pickups and a handful of checkpoints to mark your journey downwards. If you do fall further than you would ordinarily survive, your grappling

13 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

The best singleplayer levels in first-person PC games

Let me level with you

Last week we confronted Jank readers with the 17 best multiplayer FPS maps in living and possibly unliving memory. Did you think we were finished? You imbecile. You clown. Now it's time for all the brilliant singleplayer levels. And some of them aren't even about shooting.

We had originally sat down to hash out all the finest levels in first-person games without caring how many players were enjoying the view or dying from a ruptured skull. But after compiling that megalist we realised: my god, if we split this monster into multiplayer and singleplayer maps... we will have TWO articles. It was a revolutionary idea, and one that has made Jank approximately 0.05% more efficient this week. We provide stupid jokes and shareholder value.

Fort Frolic - BioShock

A bunny eared enemy with hooks waits outside the doors to Fort Frolic.

Graham: Someone, somewhere is going to say: what about The Cradle, the most beloved level from Thief: Deadly Shadows? To them we say: sorry, we haven't played it. But we have played Fort Frolic, the BioShock level from the same level designer, Jordan Thomas, in which the player is trapped in a district by Sander Cohen, an artist who works across mediums, from "creepy living statues" to "classically scored murder ballet"

12 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. The Brighton marathon is taking place today. I'm not running in it, but I will be doing something much harder: crossing the road while it takes place. Before I'm trampled to death by thousands of angry people in shorts, let's consider some of the best writing about games from across the week.

For Kotaku, Zack Zwiezen asked a flock of developers how pausing works in their games.

“In most of the Vlambeer games and Minit / Disc Room,” said developer Jan Willem Nijman, “I take a screenshot (with the UI disabled), then either jump to a completely different empty room or deactivate everything... with that screenshot as the background, [and] on unpause jump back [to the game]. Sometimes there’s a 1-frame delay because that screenshot needs the UI disabled.”

Ashley Day wrote about the experience of going back to Super Mario 64, 30 years later, to finally get those 50 bonus stars.

I’ve known for years that your reward for doing so is to meet Yoshi on the roof of the castle and receive 100 extra lives from him, but I always thought that was a bit pointless. After all, why would you need all those

11 Apr 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Triple highs

This week in PC gaming

Another week has passed, which was good in parts, and one of the good things was a new Jank list. Brendy and Graham put their heads together to work out their favourite multiplayer maps, which is a pretty extensive rundown considering it should only be Q3DM17, and there are some good additional proposals in the comments.

I reached back into Total Playtime’s Text Adventure archive to reveal that the Mass Effect Andromeda novel doesn’t have the narrative restrictions of so many other gaming books but still found its own way to be not very good. Total Playtime itself turned one-ish and celebrated by answering listener questions. Aged veteran Jim Rossignol explained why the slightly less aged Hunt Showdown is still the extraction shooter to beat and Brendy’s inaugural Living in Sim turned into a bad time driving a truck in South America.

The gaming world had large had a fairly quiet week. There was a decent news dump from the reliably good Triple-I showcase: it introduced an extremely messed-up farming sim and told us that Warren Spector’s new thieving game is out next month, the developer of 1000xRESIST is making a game about

10 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

Maybe you shouldn't play anything this weekend. Maybe you should step away from your computer, stretch your body, and grab some vitamin D before the sun disappears. Maybe your aches and pains would diminish and your spirits would rise.

Not me, though. I'll be hunched over my computer like a goblin as always. If you're similarly cursed, read on - and let us know what you're playing in the comments below.

Some ramen soup is ladeled into a bowl of noodles on a food prep surface next to other food items. — This is basically identical to Jonty's mechanic sims but with soup instead of bolts.

KuloNiku: Bowl Up!

My kid used to play the Toca Boca games on iPad - which means, of course, that I'd play them, too. The best of the bunch was Toca Sushi Kitchen, which had you chopping items in a seaside restaurant to produce California rolls, et al. KuloNiku seems to be in the same vein: soothing, simple, tactile actions to prepare food for cartoon customers, with perhaps a bit more story owing to its presumably older target audience.

A tower of girders and makeshift platforms collapses into the ocean against blue skies. — This seems like the most fun part.

All Will Fall

What if Frostpunk but also Jenga? All Will Fall is about constructing a city at sea and making the kinds of political decisions that will lead

10 Apr 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Living In Sim

Truck Mechanic is the sim you abandon by the side of the road

Let me give you the breakdown

Living In Sim is our monthly column about simulation games, and the frequently stupid misadventures they inspire.

I like to test the boundaries of a world, and today I will do so by getting my truck into fifth gear and soaring off a bridge into a river. "Your truck has been destroyed," says a game over screen, bringing a sense of mild relief now that I cannot hear all the heinous gobshites on a walkie talkie who I have quickly grown to hate. I had such high hopes for my inaugural simulator in this much-hyped column, but here I am fully and apologetically sodden in the wet pits of a Latin American waterway. There are some car crashes that simply cannot be repaired. Truck Mechanic: Dangerous Paths is one of them.

It's a straightforward premise: all the simple pleasures of unscrewing wheel bolts and calipers in Car Mechanic Simulator 2021, but with the added terror of doing so on the edge of a deep ravine. Instead of working on bits of other people's cars in a garage for cash, you are now maintaining a single vehicle of your own, taking it screeching and sputtering across a South American landscape

10 Apr 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Anniversary Sausage Mailbag

At last, the Z list

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.

It has been a whole year of Total Playtime! Plus like six weeks of Text Adventure and one week where we just bailed for scheduling reasons, all of which means that the “one year anniversary” ep arrives around the sixteen-month mark. At no point did we promise to be organised or mathematically sound, and we remain very thankful to our Patreons (and the fine backers of Jank) for funding an entire year-and-a-bit of barely-focused rambling about PC games and things pertaining to them.

Total Playtime: Anniversary Sausage Mailbag

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With this instalment we finally hit Episode Z and with it, the final inch of runway before we have to come up with a new naming convention for the 27th Patreon episode. If you come back here in two weeks we might have done so; or we'll have just moved on to A1 or Cyrillic characters or something.

To mark this momentous occasion, we opened the sausage mailbag to answer questions from our