Jank (Page 5)

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

31 Mar 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Living In Sim

Living In Sim is our new column on "simulation", whatever that means

Try simulating some enthusiasm

Simulation is a huge genre, no two people will agree where it begins or ends. When a game nails "simulator" to the end of its name, like a big plank of wood, the case seems clear cut. Flight Simulator. Gas Station Simulator. Goat Simulator. But then you have all the high-level systemic games which simulate historical nation building or space exploration. Cities Skylines calls itself a simulation, so does Crusader Kings, Rimworld, Mount & Blade, and Dwarf Fortress. Racing sims distinguish themselves from arcade racers. And sports games can veer that way too. Session is a skateboarding sim in a way that Tony Hawk's is not. Football Manager 2026 is a sim, but Rematch? Hmmm.

As I am constantly reminding Jank readers, all taxonomy is folly. Viewed from the firmament, every game is a simulation. But there is often some extra pedantry or detail that pushes a game into being classified a sim. For the purposes of this column, I don't care where that fuzzy border falls, I only care that it exists. A sim is just any videogame that commits hard to the bit.

Why sims, of all genres? Well, we're a PC gaming site, and the PC does

30 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Reviews

Screamer review: we don't give scores but this is one of those sevens

The original Screamer was the first racing game I ever played on PC. It was heavily inspired by Ridge Racer, but I didn't know that at the time. I just knew that me and my two older brothers were all competing in the same game, a rare occurrence given the age gap between us. Even in permanent third place on the time trial leaderboards, I was thrilled.

It didn't last. By the time Screamer 2 and Screamer Rally released in '96 and '97, my brothers had mostly moved on, and I played them alone. I remember being disappointed, unable to recapture the spark of excitement that I'd felt competing in the original. It would be foolish to blame the games for this, although maybe it did make a difference that I'd played actual Ridge Racer by that point. I think I'd instead be wiser to accept that the original Screamer wasn't a great game either, but that sometimes, games don't need to be great; they just need to arrive at the right time, for the right person. Enter Screamer (2026).

A raised highway racetrack through a city of tall buildings under blue skies. Three cars are visible on the track. — It's really difficult to operate four triggers and two analogue sticks and press the 'take screenshot' button at the same

29 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. As I write this, on Saturday evening, my son has just fallen asleep as I read him the closing chapters of The Hobbit. I don't take this personally. It's the first time either of us has read the book, and I think he's enjoying it, but there is perhaps nothing greater than lulling your child to sleep with a story. As you read this roundup of some good writing about videogames on Sunday morning, may you also drift off for another peaceful slumber.

Aftermath have been publishing up a storm with the delightfully named Woke Week, a "week of stories celebrating Woke 2". There were more interesting articles than I've yet had time to read, so I'm going to pick three. You should start with Gita Jackson's take on what Woke 2 means to her.

In this first version of wokeness, I wasn’t nearly as skeptical of figureheads and corporations co-signing social movements as I needed to be. I had this unshakeable belief that justice would emerge in the end, that people would do the right thing just because it was the right thing to do. I trusted companies, I put my faith in people who

28 Mar 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Epic fails

This week in PC gaming

It's Saturday, and you know what that means: time to look back at what happened in PC gaming this week.

Round these parts the big news was that Brendy doesn’t like Marathon very much, which might not sound like a particularly hot take but sure did attract some Discourse. He also found a job sim about router configuration and your reaction to that description will tell you exactly whether you want to play it or not. Sin Vega modelled a good use of AI, for a specific definition of “good”, and Total Playtime programmed some superior gaming conferences. Here is what you should be playing right now.

Beyond our hallowed walls, the magic 8-ball of games news remains stuck firmly on LAYOFFS as Epic canned 1,000 staff. The layoff announcements have become so regular and the numbers so huge that it can be challenging to visualise them, but looking at an incomplete list of the freshly-unemployed (which contains less than half of those affected) helps to bring it home: one of those documents so long it’s a physical chore to scroll through, listing lives across the world suddenly cast into a historically terrible job market.

27 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

The half-term holidays have arrived, which in my neck of the woods means all the kids are off school for the next two weeks. This is going to do wonders for my progress in Pokémon Pokopia, and serious damage to my progress in manshooter Marathon. I'm OK with this.

Here's three games you could be playing this weekend, although tell us what is providing you with sweet relief in the comments below.

Water flows through stone aqueducts in a green pastoral hillside. — Beavers and Romans differ mostly by their chosen materials.

Nova Roma

Last week, both Going Medieval and Timberborn left Early Access, but here's another citybuilder entering it - and another which offers new ways to drown your population. Nova Roma is about constructing, well, Rome, and doing so in a manner that please the Gods as well as your citizens. Expect aqueducts and lots of games journalists using "wasn't built in a day" straplines.

A TV/VCR combo displaying the league table on teletext. Derby have 12 points. — I'd like to force an American to play this.

Nutmeg!

I collected football stickers in the '90s, spent pocket money on issues of Match and Shoot, read sports scores on Ceefax and played Subutteo in my mate's loft. Nutmeg! might be a game for me, specifically. It's a football management game based around deckbuilding

27 Mar 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Sink The Business Belgrano Within You

Plus: Don't ever hire Nigel Mansell as an after-dinner speaker

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.

Once again the crew waited for me to be away before addressing a topic that I have a lot to say about, which this week is the magical world of B2B conferences. Yes, it's another bit of high-concept nonsense and just to make it extra surreal there is a quiz about Lord of the Rings as perceived by Nate's seven-year-old daughter.

Total Playtime: Sink The Business Belgrano Within You

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The quiz is a remarkable challenge for the listener alone to face, but the conference programming calls for your input. Alice, Nate and Brendy have all cast their dream B2B lineup, for a very specific prescription-painkiller type of dream, and are turning to the Total Playtime listeners and the Jank readers to vote on which is the best (details on that below). Plus: Quiet Egg, chasing the sock dragon, and a candidate for the Madonna of videogames who I can guarantee you will not guess in advance.

You can listen to the episode

25 Mar 2026 By Sin Vega Bits

I am The Thing from the Tower

Chaos ex machina

More of you need to be playing narrative strategy-RPG Heart Of The Machine. I don't care that you'll enjoy it. I just want to see what you do.

I love this kind of game. Take your wiki and your tiers and your meta and shove it up your tedious spod arse. Heart Of The Machine wants you to explore, to imagine, to play with its premise: that you're an (actual) artificial intelligence, newly sentient, in a far future dystopian city. Now what? What kind of being are you? What should you do about the world?

Don't look it up. Figure out who you are, you goddamn coward. Make a decision. Be someone.

A monochrome, humanoid robot and a human silhoutte stand either side of a text box offering two player responses: "Accept the Nuclear Device", and "Ignore her and scan the facility". Less relevant is the event itself, detailing the human, a manager, offering the player a nuclear bomb and asking them to use it on a third party. — You have been blanked. But have you been "offering a nuclear bomb" blanked?

This is not a game to win or (ugh) "beat", but to play along with its many choose-your-own-adventure style events. Its earliest paths can diverge pretty widely, offering choices in story events like "Ask to see her wares" vs "Murder her for some reason", at least unless you look further into the option to "Start Therapy". There are wonderfully evocative choices like "Befriend The Creatures", "Design Something Horrifying", and upon returning to a repeat event,