Jank (Page 5)

13 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Finally, a car mechanic sim where your mates do all the work

Jonty and Brendy "team up" in Car Service Together

"There's nothing WRONG with the brakes on this thing, you fucker!"

I raise a car on the pneumatic lift and ignore Jonty's angry outbursts from across the garage. He has been working on that ancient red banger for a while now, swearing to himself the whole time. I raise my own four-wheeled task a little higher on the lift, pop off the oil cap and drain all the dark car bile into a funnel. Simple. Car Service Together is a good old-fashioned early access co-op jankfest, and even better when you have a car-obsessed friend to do all the hard jobs.

"This customer is getting charged 200 bucks for wasting my time," mutters Jonty.

I patiently change an oil filter.

"It's absolute bullshit that you have to take the spacer and the caliper out to change brake pads."

A red car awaits service on the floor of the garage as Jonty's character inspects a button. — Jonty knows his wipers from his windscreens - a real professional.

I lower the car on my lift and fill it up with new oil. My job is done. I saunter over to Jonty, who's still struggling with the rusty bolts on the wreck in front of him. If there was a button in Car Service Together that let me arrogantly wipe

13 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Game-Themed 2026 Wellness Teams For Great Prosperity

Let game designers guide us

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's episode is a Premium instalment for paying subscribers, which means we can abandon our already tenuous grasp on current events and succumb to the intoxication of high concept. This week: as the world lurches into self-improvement at the start of the year, which videogame characters would we choose to coach us into living better?

Total Playtime: Game-Themed 2026 Wellness Teams For Great Prosperity

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You can see the picks of Brendy, Nate and myself below, and you can listen to the episode to hear our reasoning. Alice was away this week, but wished to make clear that she considered our answers poorly- thought-out and also that her choices would be Aloy off of Horizon Zero Dawn, Officer Dooley from The Darkside Detective, and that posh one off of Final Fantasy XV.

Fitness

Jonty: Ezio from Assassn's Creed

Brendy: Kiryu Kazuma from Yakuza

Nate: Schelemeus from Hades II

Motivation

Jonty: Skelly off from Hades

Brendy: ~~Little Lion from Skin Deep~~ GLaDOS from Portal

12 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Quarantine Zone: The Last Check makes me feel dead inside

Sorry mate, we're full

The seed at the heart of this game is the same as Papers, Please: you're manning a checkpoint and deciding who to let in. In this case, it’s for a zombie epidemic, so the checking is of symptoms and luggage rather than paperwork, and it’s all in full 3D, and the act of checking is merely the first step in what turns out to be a lot of different tasks and challenges which feel like they have been steadily layered on top of something that would have been more engaging had it been simpler. Instead, you get a busywork lifesim that’s surprisingly short on character, at least for the handful of hours I played it.

It all begins with triaging each person through the door. Your choices aren’t simply pass or reject; you have to send people to the safety of camp, the quarantine zone or the incinerator. In what turns out to be an early symptom - pun not intended - of the game’s problems, this is a choice with no emotional weight whatsoever. Occasionally you’ll get a fleeting word of thanks or uncertainty as they’re escorted to the killing chamber,

11 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Is Overwatch actually worth playing again?

Someone's been huffing the hype balloons

Last week a blitz of articles asserted that live servicey shooter Overwatch 2 was making a comeback, a conclusion that presumes the hero blaster had ever "gone" anywhere in the first place. PC Gamer called it a long-in-the-works "glow-up", a fairer assessment than Kotaku's grandiose statement: "While you weren't looking, Overwatch put its crown back on". Neither article examined the hero shooter and how it plays today from the position of a long-lost player, instead providing a summary of changes and dramas over the years. The recent influx of press has more to do with a PR push developers Blizzard have been making to bring attention to an (admittedly large) update that adds five new heroes in one day. The silliest part of this update is the decision to rebrand Overwatch 2 to simply Overwatch, a walking back of the sequel's grand intentions so clownish that it resulted in some more fun headlines.

So, the natural question arises: is Overwatch actually good again? Was it ever even "bad"? Maybe if someone - I dunno - replayed it and wrote about it, we can find out. So let's do that.

For context, I loved Overwatch but stopped playing in 2018

10 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

I wish videogame culture would take more cues from readers

It's time to ditch the release cycle and select what we play via more interesting constraints.

The book readers have it figured out. I listen to book podcasts and follow a lot of (I hate this word) bookstagrammers, and the turnover of a new year is the best time to do either of those things. This is because they're all reviewing their reading goals for the year that was and the year to come. Did they finish the number of classics they'd hoped? Did they finish the bibliography of Ballard novels? And will next year be the year they really commit to #JanuaryInJapan, when all over the world people dedicate themselves to reading translated fiction from the country?

I wish we did more of the same in videogames. Our equivalent discourse gets as far as ranking the best games of the year that was, and then immediately moves on to anticipating the next year's new releases, pre-emptively stuffing our backlogs with games we'll rue not having had the time to play when the next year draws to a close. Couldn't we set ourselves some more interesting constraints?

The problem - I don't think I'm blowing anyone's mind here - is in part that videogames culture is so commercial. Publishers make money by selling you something new,

09 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell News

Samurai Gunn 2 got rebuilt from scratch and it's still ferocious

A nippy new engine to die in

It is Sunday night and I am kicking my own severed head around on the paving stones. My brother stands on a filthy platform high above me, hand on his katana, he is grinning precisely as a terrible killer might. He dashes left and turns invisible. Not this time. I focus. An entire second passes - a lifetime. I scan the air for signs of hopping feet.

There! I fire my gun, a flaming bullet strikes a wall, hitting nothing but stone. My two hands freeze with rigor mortis anticipation just as my body is severed into two large pieces. My brother reappears, cackling. I am dead, but at least Samurai Gunn 2 has been reborn.

If you peer back through the bamboo forest of yesteryear you might remember Samurai Gunn 2 coming out in 2021 as an early access couch brawler. It was a high-functioning sequel to one of the most brutally fun multiplayer party fighters this side of Nidhogg. You get three bullets and a sword: fight.

It saw a roster of special guest characters added over a couple of years, including the little guys from Minit, a crewmate from Among Us, and the cast of

08 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading.

Good morning, videogames. Stretch at the knees, spread your toes, and feel the brushed cotton ensconcing you like a big toasty cinnamon bun... Uh oh. Gotta read some good reads from across the week.

Obsidian released three games last year - an absurd number from a single studio in the modern era. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier visited the studio in the aftermath as it attempts to change its development processes to make games more quickly and cheaply.

Last year the developer released three games—a rare and impressive achievement for a studio of its size—but two of them failed to meet sales forecasts set by Obsidian’s parent company, Microsoft Corp. “They’re not disasters,” Urquhart says. “I’m not going to say this was a kick in the teeth. It was more like: ‘That sucks. What are we learning?’”

Stardew Valley is ten years old. IGN's Rebekah Valentine spoke to developer ConcernedApe about the game's success and his future.

So I asked you about big positive moments in the last 10 years. What about challenging times? Is there any moment in the last 10 years of Stardew that you recall as being exceptionally difficult or frustrating?

Barone: I think

07 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: BG3TV, indefinite Overwatch, types of quest

Last week in PC gaming

It’s Saturday, which means it’s time to review the week in PC gaming. Chez Jank, Brendy completed his mountain-climbing adventure by being eaten by the developer of Cairn, before killing all his squad members in Menace, reviewing TR-49 and proposing some additional Types of Quest. Graham found the perfect Speed Racer game but can’t play it, and a perfect PICO-8 that he can’t stop playing. The minds at Total Playtime decreed that the Splinter Cell novel and Split Fiction are both bad.

Beyond these walls, we learned that there's a Baldur's Gate 3 TV show in the works, although Larian are not involved which is another little data point on why they're sticking with their own IP for their next game. It's being made by Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin, which I prefer to think of as Chernobyl showrunner Craig Mazin because that was much better television.

i think in the name of fairness the producers of the baldur's gate tv show should demand that tv writers do at least a year of running around in circles doing unpaid writing tests before they're allowed to write for the show
— Bruno Dias (@brunodias.bsky.