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08 Sep 2026 By Nic Reuben Reviews

The Blood Of Dawnwalker review

Dawn Walker? I thought you said his name was Coen?!

Two weeks ago, the vampire that rules over Coen of Laslea's valley torched his village, captured his family, and cursed Coen to an eternity of blood thirst. This evening, Coen is standing on a mountain pass, getting pelted with rocks by large, jeering goat people. "Baah", they taunt. "Baaah-ha-ha".

Coen isn't happy about this, but he can't do a thing. This is because I've decided the goat people are my friends, so I keep choosing pacifist dialogue options despite three opportunities - and constant encouragement from my companion - to kill them all.

I'm having one of a handful of asterisk-free excellent times thus far in The Blood Of Dawnwalker. Mostly because the game has finally offered up a crumb of that good, good whimsy after submerging me in fifteen hours of muck, pestilence, viscera, laborious combat, torture, 'excellent artisanal' epic trousers, and despair.

See that castle? You can go bowling with it.

There are sweetly sombre vistas and scenes of chilling folk horror lurking in this cursed valley; awe and terror dancing around the maypole together. There are fascinating hints at a history of forbidden magic, and uncomfortably tangible tales of oppression tolerated through paralysing fear of the alternative. Before Brencis came, cruel boyars ran unchecked, and the black death ran rife. Now, every week at mass, his vampire court drink from the people, and share their blood in return. The plague is gone. The boyars were hanged. Newborns are the "strongest they've ever been". Vampire tyranny is one thing, but vampire populism? What a hook.

There is all that, plus some of the best violin scraping and the absolute best gnarled bog trees ever committed to Unreal Engine. But there's also such constant, droning misery and aimless sadism-as-set-dressing that Dawnwalker often devolves into a four Yorkshireman-esque pissing contest with itself. "It smells of rot and blood here," Coen groans as he enters a cave. Yes, Coen. I know, I know. It's rot and blood all the way down.

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07 Sep 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Let me give my space commander a silly voice, cowards

Pick of the squeak

I have played Star Wars: Zero Company for about three hours total, and approaching a quarter of that time was spent in the character creator. This is fairly common. If I have any aspiration to spend time with a game that is equipped with a character creation tool - if I have any commitment beyond vague tourism - then I consider it essential to pick though all the options and craft something that, invariably, makes me laugh.

I would do this even if the character’s appearance is limited to a 32x32 headshot at the bottom of a stats chart, because vibe is important to me and sometimes the vibe demands an eyepatch, or high-piled set of dreadlocks, or a truly hideous jacket colour. The more serious the game, the more important this becomes: there is no text exchange about crop rotation or galactic diplomacy that cannot be improved by my character staring implacably ahead while looking like they were dressed by a five-year-old picking from the most cursed remnant rail in TK Maxx.

Sometimes I will play it straight and come up with something conventionally attractive, as long as it’s not a boring white man

06 Sep 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. I have a bumper crop of good articles to share this week so there's no time to spare. Let's get going.

Patrick Miller has been writing about and designing fighting games for years, and most recently worked on Riot's 2XKO. This past week, he wrote more about what he values in the games he plays, why he loves fighting games specifically, and why he doesn't care for games he describes as "opiates".

I say this as someone who has loved video games his whole life; if games serve a load-bearing function in someone's life, it's the life that needs fixing, not the games.

A man after Brendy's heart. Personally I don't want videogames to be opiates, but I'm okay with them being weed.

A similar argument from a different angle, Lincoln Carpenter wants MMOs to waste his time again. Me too.

WoW has become a relentlessly efficient machine, ensuring players waste the least possible time while being propelled through seasonal ranks and escalating difficulty tiers. In terms of providing their users with those quantifiable successes, it's hard to argue that the MMOs of today aren't

05 Sep 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail - Numbers, crunching

This week in PC gaming

Another week in the PC gaming mines and oh, such wonders it has produced. Nic Ruben wrote an ode to parrying in general and its delivery in Onimusha in particular.

At their best, nailing a string of parries and ripostes feels like performing Swan Lake while winning a rap battle against god. At their worst, they're the design equivalent of blending a bag of spinach into sugary pasta sauce so fussy toddlers don't realise they're eating quicktime event.

Graham spoke to the people who put Spelunky 1 in Spelunky 2 to create a new, still more powerful Spelunky. This is very important to people like us who have spent hundreds of hours in each game.

Spelunky 2's World 1, by comparison, feels designed for the player. "Spelunky 2 essentially did away with level feelings and moved its extended content into dedicated areas you can visit by taking branching paths, which ends up trading variation for player choice," says SNF. One of those choices happens at the end of World 1 after you fight a mini boss. You can decide whether to go left or right to determine what kind of World 2 you get, but

04 Sep 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

And what we're playing

September always bring an avalanche of game releases, but I'm told that this September is even more of a whiteout than normal. Honestly? You wouldn't know it to look at the PC release calendar, where the month looks exactly as blizzardy as it always does, and pretty much as snow-packed as every other month. I think I maybe just care about different games.

Here are three of this month's releases that you could be playing this weekend. Tell us what you are playing in the comments.

Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault

Moonlighter has a wonderfully straightforward premise: go dungeon delving for treasure at night, then sell that treasure in your shop during the day. It was partly responsible for popularising what's become a genre, and this sequel with fully 3D environments has now hit 1.0 after a little less than a year in Early Access. I hate the subtitle, but don't hold that against it.

[Disclosure from Brendy: I worked on this game's story in its earliest stages - Graham forgot to say. But as far as I can tell they didn't use a damned word! So if there are zero jokes

03 Sep 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Subpoena the Teenage Snitch

Cyberleek and a German week

Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, funded entirely by our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.

For the first time in a while all four of us could make this recording, and it's a free-to-all news episode to boot. This meant we had to address the twin issues of Gamescom and an abundance of GTA 6 footage, both from vegetable-themed hackers and latterly Rockstar themselves via an extended preview on Netflix. The former is a much more interesting discussion point, although not particularly impressive unless it later transpires it was the previous GTA hacker doing it with even less technology this time.

I am also able to share some limited insights from Gamescom, although not all that much because I only saw three games and one of them I can't write about. Please support Jank so that we have enough money to send Brendy next year and have him report on all the very weirdest games on the different international stages.

03 Sep 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

These folks put Spelunky (1) in Spelunky (2) so you can Spelunky (1) while you Spelunky (2)

HDMod sends you back to the worlds of the original Spelunky with all the polish of the sequel

Spelunky 1 is the best game ever made. I prefer its pacing, difficulty, and variety to its sequel. And yet if I was to recommend one of these games to a new player, I would find it difficult to advocate for the original. Spelunky 2, released eight years later (and twelve years after the original freeware version), has better player movement, better art, and a dozen small design changes that make it a smoother experience. Spelunky 1 is the better game - the best game! - but it feels old by comparison.

Enter the creators of the HDMod for Spelunky 2, which recreates the original Spelunky's world generation, enemies, characters and items within the sequel. So now I can play Spelunky 1 inside Spelunky 2 and experience the best of both.

"Spelunky 2 feels like an improvement in almost every aspect," says Super Ninja Fat (SNF), one of the mod's creators, speaking to me over email. "The engine alone made many fixes, mechanic improvements and quality of life changes over the original. However, many fans like myself miss the first game's pacing and content distribution."

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02 Sep 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Living In Sim

A shadowy group has captured the early 2000s military sim

And they're threatening to execute it if their demands are not met

Last week I learned that if you serve in the Territorial Army, even for a short time, you get a discount to Disney World. There is some kind of insight here for a clever person to make, something about the intersection between playfighting and realfighting. Perhaps hiding under the camo of each soldier boy, with all their manoeuvres and training and trigger discipline, we are destined to find a little kid playing pew pew.

If we dip hard enough into tactical first-person military sim Dagger Directive, maybe we'll find that inner child. Its genetic material is Tomothon McClancy's Rainbow Six (1998) or maybe more accurately Rogue Spear. The aesthetic is rooted firmly in early 2000s counterterrorism shooters like Soldier Of Fortune. The cursor in the menus is a crosshair. When you quit to desktop it asks: "Do you really want to go back to being a civilian?" This game could not be more Y2K if it came on a free CD-ROM in a packet of breakfast cereal sponsored by the US Navy SEALs.

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

Yet it's no boomer shooter, not exactly. The simulation elements go surprisingly hard. There are ricochet physics, shrapnel from frag grenades, ACOG scopes with adjustable ranges, and only lying prone will give you a truly steady aim. You will perish with a single hit, and enemies go down just as quick. You can either use nightvision goggles or your scope, never both. There's no HUD to speak of - no ammo counter, no health bars - and reloading a clip that's still half-full is a waste of bullets. Veteran milsimmers are free to turn the crosshair off completely in the settings, although I will not surrender this. A man must have his comforts.

The tutorial mission made me worry there was a problem with the scale in the levels. It's a long empty jaunt from the obstacle course to the firing range for seemingly no reason. Only when I played the real missions did I understand this is reflective of the whole game. Maps are expansive combat zones - snowy mountain ranges, whole towns surrounded by broad prairies, stretches of rural countryside with village after village.

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