Jank (Page 6)

06 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

Another weekend? So soon? I am not at all prepared for this collision with two days of supposed non-work, but I hope that you are making merry, putting your feet up, and stuffing your gullet with salty, crunchy videogames.

Here what you should or could be playing. Tell us what you actually are playing in the comments.

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined

I am not an RPG guy, but oh how I dream of being. Alas, I tried playing the Dragon Quest VII Reimagined demo and fell asleep on the couch within an hour. I'm like yer da putting the snooker or bowls on TV on a Sunday - I see the colour green and I'm out. If you've greater fortitude than I, this seems like a great modernisation of one of the genre's classics, with lots of fast-forward and automation options to make the combat more fun (and an anthology structure to make the 85-hour runtime less intimidating).

A spaceship with a lot of complicated parts, viewed from above, possibly on fire. — This is fine.

06 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

Menace wants you dead

Joke's on you, I love to die

Take a good look at that title font, you'll be seeing this shade of red a lot. Menace is the new XCOM-flavoured turn-based tactics lad who just dropped in from orbit to shoot you in the shinbones and make a mocking crybaby face at you as you bleed out. It is quite difficult.

It's also a very slow burner. I have put nine hours into the brutal early access build and all I have to show for it are three dead friends and a rocket launcher made out of sellotape. If you're familiar with Battle Brothers - the previous tactical death sentence this studio released - you'll know how it goes. You are once again raising a mercenary army, yet are persistently outnumbered, outgunned, and underfunded. There is an element of sci-fi horror to how quickly you can run out of money. In space, no one can give you a small business loan.

A dropship hovers over a desert planet as many troops stand watching it fly away. — That dropship looks a little familiar but let's say nothing.

A disaster has occurred aboard your military spaceship, and as the highest-ranking officer to survive the catastrophe, you are now in charge. Great timing, as your vessel has arrived in a foreign solar system of pirate scum,

05 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Bugpunk

In which people become very cross about Split Fiction

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’s Thursday, so that means a new episode of Total Playtime, and as part of our current partnership I am compelled to bring it to your attention. This week’s episode, after an extended aside about shrimp (real; either annoying or delicious) and ahead of a discussion of Silt Striders (not real; valuable public infrastructure), is anchored by the news that progress has been made on the Split Fiction movie, which Alice cited as a transparent segue into her talking about the fact that she has been playing Split Fiction and is extremely furious about it.

Total Playtime Episode 28: Bugpunk

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I will not attempt to summarise her argument but the topline is that the characters, narrative and game itself are all bad in ways seemingly calculated to enrage. Some of these views are shared by Graham and, to a degree, Brendy - I have not played the game so I will not judge, but that’s okay because Alice offers judgment

05 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

I can't stop playing KOLYDR

A new classic from the master craftsman of browser games.

I can't describe KOLYDR more succinctly than it describes itself, as a game in which "you clear out reds by crashing into blues until a green appears." It's a tiny, single screen PICO-8 game you can play in your browser right now. What makes me keep playing is that it's a game of constant risk and reward, one where nearly every moment is a gamble and every death was preventable if only I hadn't pushed my luck.

This is also what makes me yowl in anguish every time I die.

Here's the longer explanation of how KOLYDR works: you move a small craft (using arrow keys, ESDF or gamepad) around a square arena. Blue squares appear which explode when touched, and the explosions destroy red squares, which are otherwise gradually filling the arena. Destroyed red squares drop gold which can be collected and are worth 100 points. After a short while, green squares will begin to appear which allow you to end your run and bank your score.

Naturally, you want your score to be as high as possible, so you don't leave when a green exit first appears. Instead, you keep going, as reds appear at random throughout the

04 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

There are only 9 types of quest, says Fallout creator - but what about these?

Let's talk quest this out

How many types of quest are there in an RPG? Shut up, the question has already been answered by Fallout creator Tim Cain, who says there are nine - count 'em - nine types of quest. When you set off as Goblonk the Brave this morning you didn't know it, but you're only going to see these nine familiar missions as you travel the kingdom. At least according to Cain.

I think he might be missing a few. More importantly, the whole idea of taxonomising quests this way risks stripping the flavour out of quest design by limiting everything to a set menu of indivisible "ingredients". We're not making a casserole here. And even if we were, why can't I put some nettles in just to see what happens? There are a lot of quests that just don't fit the mold.

First, you can watch Cain's whole video on the taxonomy here. It's interesting. And to be fair, it's more like a fifteen-minute blast of audible thoughts than any grand theory of quest design. I don't think Cain intends to publish this in a peer-reviewed journal or anything. But that doesn't mean I can't pick a thoughtfight.

04 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

Modders have turned one of racing's most hardcore sims into a Speed Racer game

And I'm crashing out at the first corner over and over.

I love Speed Racer, the Wachowski's kaleidoscopic family film which depicts a form of racing that's both a transcendent act of self-expression and an absurd, Wacky Races-style gauntlet around the coolest Hot Wheels track you've ever seen. The film was accompanied at the time by Speed Racer: The Videogame, a middling tie-in for the Wii. It deserved better.

Enter Assetto Corsa. The 2014 racing game is a staggeringly detailed simulation of real cars and racetracks, but it's also home to a vibrant modding community. Which I discovered when YouTube offered up a video titled "Insane Speed Racer mod" and didn't disappoint.

The copyrighted soundtrack isn't present in the mod, to be clear.

I love arcade racing games, but sims tend to be beyond my tolerance (unless they're about delivering freight across Europe). I have therefore never previously had any interest in playing Assetto Corsa until I saw the video above, at which point I immediately got it on Steam.

If you're now considering doing the same, I should warn you: all my dreams did not come true.

For a start, there is no "Speed Racer mod", as the YouTube video title suggests. There are instead two different mods: a T-180

04 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Peak

Three game devs climbed a mountain - epilogue

We've Peaked

So all of my interview subjects died. Big deal. We learned some things along the way, didn't we? Back in Peak's lobby (a cartoonish airport you can play around in) the developers and I have a debrief. Is there anything they've learned while playing Peak - apart from the fact that having friends is fun?

"Don't work on a game for five years," says Bennett, referencing the fact that Peak was reportedly made in just a few months, yet has sold a huge number of copies.

"Yeah," says Holly, "that's a big one, honestly... it shows how you don't need to spend a huge amount of time if you just go in with a really simple premise and kind of extrapolate your idea from there."

"Yeah, do a little less," laughs Bennett.

For a full list of articles in this series - click here

What do they think of the game itself? What's interested them most about it?

"I think it's really interesting, especially in multiplayer, if I look at the 40 minutes we've played, we've obviously climbed, but also I've been fed,

03 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

The first Splinter Cell novel makes Sam Fisher into a neocon Alan Partridge

I thought this guy was supposed to be stealthy

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 to bring their premium episodes to our paying subscribers - but we’re making this episode free to all.

Text Adventure is Total Playtime’s videogame book club, in which we read a videogame novelisation and try very hard to like it. In this episode, Alice, Nate and I were joined by the delightful Johnny Chiodini to read the first book based on Sam Fisher, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell by David Michaels. Nate fell at the first hurdle by erroneously reading the second novelisation, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Operation Barracuda, which speaks to the professionalism of the Total Playtime operation and why we felt it aligned with a website called Jank.

The practical impact of this error was limited, as both books are archetypal hoo-rah Clancyverse publications of the mid-2000s, when the US-lead invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were still fresh. Both books were best-sellers, neither of them are any good, and the first is notable for capturing the spirit of the game in a startlingly negative way.

Text Adventure: Johnny Chiodini's Raymond

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For a full list of articles in this series - click here