The trouble I usually have with 4Xeses is the fiddling. Shuffling units around, optimising the workers, replacing outmoded armies, making sure everything is building something useful. It's why a war kicking off is usually the point at which I give up.
The main ways to prevent this are delegation, and restricting the player's capacity to intervene. Stellar Monarch 2 combines both in a curious arrangement of massive scale and limited scope. It is a monarch simulator, after a fashion, wherein you're responsible for specific duties, but the rest are someone else's job. The empire won't grind to a halt without you, but it absolutely will not act on those things that require your instruction, like which planets to claim or what to research. Conquering and building three planets is a matter of clicking a few times to authorise it, then waiting. Fleets are regularly built and retired, applying research bonuses, and optionally redesigned in composition. The most complex bit of the game, but rarely needed.
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You're reading Sin's column about the games of yesteryear. Not old enough to be retro, not shiny enough to be new. This is the hinterland of PC gaming. And the first of our subscriber goals!
No one can account for their time on Earth quite like a player of videogames. It's hard not to, as software and hardware conspire together to tally up your time gaming and taunt you with it at every turn. Steam helpfully logs how many hours you've spent on a game right below the Play button, Nintendo Switch users can see their hour counts in their player profiles, and just about every platform will send you a year-end email tabulating how many days your combined hours of gaming add up to. No one — not my partner, not my employer, not my very anxious dog — keeps tabs on my time quite like the videogames I play.
Decades of this quantification has cultivated an unusual relationship between the player and time. Countless souls, intrigued by a game, will habitually check HowLongToBeat.com to see what a new game they're interested in might ask of them. It does not matter that, statistically, almost no players finish games. The ritual persists: a given videogame's estimated completion time is weighed against the player's feather of Anubis, and depending on some arcane calculus based on genre, cost, prestige, marketing, and prior commitments (both to other games as well as people), a game is deemed worthy in its demands or preposterous.
I find this behaviour absurd. Bonkers. Strange. A terrible relationship to have with an art form or leisure pursuit. I object because I have identified it in myself, and recoil in horror. How unfortunate that there are some games for which the first thing you hear about them is how long they are! Dragon Quest VII, for example, is "the one that's a hundred hours long," necessitating an abridged remake. Assassin's Creed games have a similar reputation, as if those not in the habit of playing them ought not to start unless they have some sort of lengthy medical leave planned. And then there are the truly outrageous feats like this month's Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter, a remake of the second game in Falcom's 13-parts-and-counting soap opera, one of the most staggering time-sinks in the medium.
They should really change some of these lightbulbs
I want to call Derelikt a "love letter" to sci-fi corridors, but its probably more of an affectionate PDA diary entry, quickly scribbled as alien creatures breached the doors of the sleeping quarters. Or maybe a romantic memo written in blood on the windows of the biological testing facilities. An affectionate post-it note, stuck next to a gore spattered keypad that reads: "I love you, space corridors! Anyway the code is 2000 - the year I shit myself playing a demo for Alien Resurrection."
Derelikt is still in development, but it's open to playtesters this week. So I went clattering down its metal passageways in search of my childhood. I didn't find it - you never do. But I did go "ah, that's nice" quite a lot.
The aesthetic inspirations are Alien Resurrection for the most primal of PlayStations, yes, but the attention to detail goes far beyond your average boomer shooter's post-processing shaders. The textures warp as you turn your view. Vertices snap as they reach the edge of your display. The end of a corridor is often pitch black, a recreation of the PlayStation's infamously limited draw distance. It is sci-fi
Good morning, videogames. Some weeks, no great writing about gaming comes to me organically and I need to make a special effort to go looking for it. I hope you appreciate the sacrifices I have made for you this week in reading and rejecting several dreadful reviews, previews and features to find even a handful I could bring myself to share. Thankfully, once the games are out of the way, I get to link to a great and somewhat horny article by a nonagenarian.
One of the pumping limpets clinging to the walls of bilge-filled cultural adulterant PC Gamer With Airs wrote a review of Roman Sands RE:Build that is worth putting your waders on for.
Each of those component games is a short masterpiece, executed with huge prowess at every level of the art, sound, design and writing. They might seem totally dissimilar, at first. One game is a hyperactive, time-looping hotel job simulator in which you tend to some cartoonishly awful older guests, shifting incrementally between times of day as you hurry between parts of a garish and phantasmagorical resort that is being menaced by an approaching sun. It's a place without memory, in
The week is over and it's definitely autumn now, which I don't care for, but there are some good games and good words to comfort us as the evenings draw in. For the latter, we did some important financial journalism to find out who could make the most without spending any money in Wardogs, and I won't say who won on money but Brendy definitely won on depravity:
I crawl forward to a screaming teammate, lying in the grass ahead of me, and take his machine gun, helmet, and armour. I turn to crawl away, and then think better of it. I turn to revive him. Because it will earn me money. Unfortunately, two other people have had the same idea. We all crowd around our fallen comrade, rubbing our hands together like three fuckbois warming their hands over a Tinder profile.
You also get lowercase jank. Lots of it. "Bordering on a professional dilemma" kind of jank. There is so much going wrong with this game that I'm unsure if this will be a recommendation or an SOS.
Dare I spend a huge chunk of money on Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave? I haven't loved an entry in the turn-based tactics series since Awakening, and there's a chance I'd be buying something a hundred hours-long that I only end up playing for six. Plus, I have Star Wars: Zero Company right here, waiting, unplayed, if I want some turn-based shenanigans.
And yet, it looks new and shiny. Below you'll find three other new and shiny things you could spend money on, but tell us what you're actually playing in the comments. And what I should do about Fire Emblem.
The next entry in Nihon Falcom's ongoing remake project for their classic JRPG series. Trails games are long and numerous, with airships, melodrama, and both turn-based and real-time hack-and-slash combat. I played a couple of hours of the previous game in the series and It Was Not For Me, but if you're more tolerant of cumbersome tutorialisation and adoptive sibling romance then I hear there's a great world and story to explore and hundreds of hours of games
Alice is away this week, so three grown men got to sit around and puzzle over a particularly baffling week of news items and become steadily less certain that we were describing reality.
There were some positives: Nate got to let a year’s worth of Hearthstone annoyance off his chest, Brendy got to drop an unexpected Halo deep cut, and I got to talk about a nice cat that I met. All solid therapeutic behaviours. Plus: subscribing to Accomplished Shootsman Magazine, earning money for being meat in the room, and surviving the horrors of modern capitalism. You can listen right here on this page, or find us in many of the places you get your podcasts.
Our music is by God Ribbon, our art is by Marsh Davies and our editing is by Alix Attenborough. The podcast only exists thanks to those who subscribe to Jank (and previously funded us on Patreon) who are additionally rewarded with an extra episode every other week dedicated to things like our videogame book club and the developing trials of Games Satan. Subscribe today and get us closer to being able to afford Brendy full-time.
"I've heard it's similar to Disco Elysium. But Miéville’s must be better, because he has two"
Hell is ascendant. The nightmare moon hangs askew in the rust-blighted sky, low enough to reach down and steal a bite of your waffle cone. Again!
To your left, a battle-worn clowder of gangrenous strays mew the theme to The Godfather, miring your senses in discordant trills : Meooow Mow-mow mooow mow mow-mow.
From beyond the veil, exactly 58 tiny voices scrape at your fragile subconscious, each trying to tell you about a different roguelike card-battler released in the last four hours. Every one of them is 'must play', they insist. (whispery voice) Must play. Must play. Must Play.
Quick. Get inside. It's safe here. We have gathered all the videogames and burned them alive. Only books remain.
Welcome.
Welcome to the inaugural Jank-dition of What's On Your Bookshelf - our regular chat with a selection of excellent game-humans about books! Kicking things off, it's none other than Esoteric Ebb's Christoffer Bodegård! Cheers Chris - mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
Liberal Fascisms! One of many essay collections of Žižek, his latest I believe. Once I got out of the slump of extreme-hardcore-crunch, writing thousands of words a day all throughout 2025 and up to Ebb's launch, I needed a cleanser. Or at least a solid hook to start reading again. I find Slavoj Žižek's pop-culture zeitgeist lens incredibly entertaining, and his work gives me the exact same dopamine rush I get from watching overtly political YouTubers rant about current day topics, except I get to actually stop and look up/learn about new sources/concepts/words every other page or so.
I'm also working my way through the Tales of Dunk and Egg! For one reason: I very much enjoyed the dread of watching Game of Thrones slowly collapse into complete sadness - starting with season 4 - since I read ahead to Dance after season 2 dropped. After watching AKOTSK with the boys (which was an experience), I decided to jump onto that same ship once more. I mean, I really hope the following seasons hold up. But now I'm invested, so bring on the pain!
What's On Your Bookshelf has returned thanks to new supporters of Jank helping us to reach one of our subscriber goals! Thanks to everyone who signed up over the past month.
