Jank (Page 7)

17 Mar 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

I didn't think Slay The Spire needed a sequel. That was dumb

I am Doom-pilled

When Slay The Spire 2 was announced, I honestly didn't feel the need for it. The first game - deckbuilder of all deckbuilders - spawned a torrential smorgasbord of inspirants that has for years inflamed Steam's guts. If you really wanted Slay The Spire But More, you only had to put your hand into those guts and pull out any one of the dozens of disciples and see if they put a sufficiently intriguing twist on the formula. Monster Train. Griftlands. Roguebook. Fights In Tight Spaces. StarVaders. It remains a feast out there for rummagers of roguelike card wreckers. I didn't think there was much a Slay The Spire sequel could do to rekindle my feverish obsession that any of these games couldn't.

I stare now into the beady eyes of a gigantic crab with full knowledge of my inadequacies. What a fool I am.

I will admit much of the giddiness comes from being intimately familiar with the rhythm of play already. I know the playstyle of the Silent (the returning skull-faced poisoner from the first game) better than I know the crannies of my own bathroom. I understand the push and pull of cardy combat well enough to

16 Mar 2026 By Alice Bell Reviews

Esoteric Ebb review

A smart, funny puzzle game in RPG clothing

I have heard Esoteric Ebb described as Discworld Elysium, which is useful to give you an initial sketch. It's a tale of political intrigue amongst rival factions in a city about to boil over, as you, a hapless detective, find yourself in the middle of an investigation that could change everything. But, crucially, it's all fantasy themed and it's really funny. It's not as funny as Pratchett, mind you. But I'm monstrously protective of the man and his work, and am tempted to dock points from anything where people draw a comparison, out of spite. So maybe it is as funny as him; it's certainly much funnier than most games that try to be funny at all.

You're gallivanting around Norvik, a place with a map larger than you'd think, art more beautiful than you asked for, and a soundtrack better than you, you lowly sinner, deserve. Norvik is a human city days away from its first ever election. An already fraught situation was enfraughtened further when a local tea shop exploded. It was a) the meeting point for local radicals and b) on land that belongs to the city's goblins. Because, oh yes, Norvik was founded on goblin land,

15 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. My elbows hurt, as they often do in the mornings of late. This has now crossed the rubicon from "oh I slept weird again" to "oh this is some sort of new repetitive strain injury, isn't it." Let's look on the bright side: I now know the word "cubital" and it's a delight to say aloud. Try it. I run my cuticles along by cubital in my cubicle at work. Let's look for other new words by perusing some fine writing about videogames (and beyond) from across the week.

Almost every paragraph of Sam Henri Gold's post about the MacBook Neo is deliciously quotable. I had no interest in the device itself, but this is about what it feels like to be young and finding yourself through a computer.

Yes, you will hit the limits of this machine. 8GB of RAM and a phone chip will see to that. But the limits you hit on the Neo are resource limits — memory is finite, silicon has a clock speed, processes cost something. You are learning physics. A Chromebook doesn’t teach you that. A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into

14 Mar 2026 By Brendan Caldwell

Jank Mail: Do you requiem what I told you yesterday?

This week in PC gaming

Good afternoon. Jonty, the usual author of Jank Mail, is away on a business trip. He is at the Game Developers Conference in the Weimar Republic of America, interviewing games industry people and typing up their words with bloodshot, jet-lagged eyes for his other, proper job. Disgusting.

That means I'm in charge of the weekly newsletter. I promise not to talk about hacking sims and skateboarding and Tekken. Here's what we've been up to at Jank, and what's been going on in the broader world of video and/or games.

First, here at Jank Dot Cool I finally completed Resident Evil Requiem and wrote a review. The short version is that it's dumb fun, stacked with characterful zombies, and full of fan service. My brother describes it as the Resident Evil equivalent of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and I cannot dispute this theory. I guess we should have expected as much with "Requiem" in the title.

Grace from Resident Evil Requiem cradles Emily in the glow of a fire with a pained expression. — I've started to use the word "requiem" like a verb, to bewilder friends and family. "Have you requiemed your doctors appointment?" "Sorry, I think you're misrequiembering."

We also discovered the font it uses for the game's dramatic (comically inconsistent) mega-text splashes. We didn't

13 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Give me your comments, I need them to live

This week felt like a merciful relief when compared to the machinegun of new releases at the beginning of March. Still, perhaps your hunger is not yet sated. Perhaps you wish for more new games, games about mending teapots, making spells, and murdering monsters.

What a coincidence, here are some games that meet those specific criteria. Let us know what you are playing in the comments down below.

How about a cosy back-to-basic life sim but it's about moving away from streaming services in favour of neatly maintaining the tags on your locally stored mp3 collection?

Piece By Piece

Repair items for animal folk by jigsawing them back together, then use the money you make to decorate your shop. There's some obvious Animal Crossing inspiration here (the fonts, the UI, the character designs), but gardening and painting aside, it seems much more focused on the soothing loop of shop management.

What a magnificent beast. Let's kill it.

Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection

I've never managed to get into a Monster Hunter game, but the Stories spin-off series seems like my most likely route in at this point. Twisted Reflection looks like it moves a little closer to the main

12 Mar 2026 By Alice Bell Podcast

Total Playtime: Henry Rollins Pirate Accountant Simulator

Let's play Simulation Simulator

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 we find ourselves in a situation where I, Alice, was not there to record this episode, but am here to write the description for it. I can call Jonty a big smelly poohead and there's nothing he can do about it! Haha! You should have come up with a Podcast Post Editing Simulator, Jonty. That's the theme this week: coming up with pastimes to make simulation games about, but which have not already been simulated by ambitious and fast-moving developers. It turns out there are a lot of sim games.

Total Playtime: Henry Rollins Pirate Accountant Sim

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Nevertheless, the lads were able to come up with several concepts, as follows:

Philosophy Professor Simulator
Henry Rollins Pirate Accountant Simulator
Lin Manuel Miranda's Bin Man Hell Uganda
Left Wing Roid Monster Olympics (not the name Nate actually gave it but I feel mine is more evocative and not open to a lawsuit from Andy Samburg)
Local Election Sim
Museum Attendant Simulator

12 Mar 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Reviews

Resident Evil Requiem review

Meets the minimum requiements

Requiem wants to be all things to all Resident Evildoers. It is one half Victorian freak show and one half shotgun-toting facekicker. It wants to scare you and to psych you up, empower and disempower you with alternating waves of scares and action. It is both third-person Leon sim and first-person Grace 'em up. Yes, you can change the view of either character in the settings but I kept things default, if only to test the game's thesis - that being stuck in a girl's head is scary whereas watching a big man's muscles move is powerful.

Like many a rotting zombie, it starts to fall apart in the bottom half. I had a good time, even if it sometimes felt like playing a videogame through glasses rose-tinted with indecision. This is a Resident Evil that seeks to please everybody, and you could argue it has done so. But there is a feeling like it has achieved this by hiding in the safe room of nostalgia and bursting out every few minutes with the biggest gun in its inventory - a dude who everyone already loves.

A zombie policeman smiles as he is pierced through the eye socket with a poker. — Eye don't want to use the obvious pun but eye can't help it

11 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

Project TurboBlast's vehicles have wheels, but it's an antigrav racer in spirit

You know where you stand with a name like TurboBlast

It's difficult to find arcade racers where the handling isn't either mundane by dint of hewing too closely to ancient inspirations, or too fussy or difficult by dint of having been designed by sickos who are much better at these games than I am.

Project TurboBlast hits a sweet spot, judging by its demo, from its on-the-nose name to its F-Zero-on-wheels boost-happy racing style. "Don't blink," the announcer yells at the beginning of each final lap, and I don't think I did.

The music is great in this trailer, too.

Let me clarify "F-Zero-on-wheels". TurboBlast's tracks are wide, twisty, often suspended above an abyss, and covered in glowing boost pads, like every antigrav racer you've ever played including the likes of WipeOut. Your actual vehicles are on wheels, however, both cars or bikes, and you'll need to drift around every corner like in a Mario Kart or a Victory Heat Rally, one of the better arcade racers from recent years.

TurboBlast really is all about managing your turboblast. Aside from the boosts littered across the track, you have a slowly re-filling boost meter that can be used to build speed at any time. If you empty that bar, your vehicle