Jank (Page 7)

01 Sep 2026 By Nic Reuben Feature

The new Onimusha has won parrying, now give it a rest

Sekiroverkill

Parrying is gaming's best and raddest adoption - a decisive and effortlessly stylish retort that serves instant, embarrassing karma to threats as diverse as lightning bolts, chainsaws, and freight trains. Press R1 to pay absolutely no respect. It's also a cheap trick that shrinks gods and monsters to the tiny space where your blades meet, reducing the shadows of colossi to whimpering bunny silhouettes. 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.

I recently discovered my least favourite parry ever in Marvel's Spider-Man 2. Fights in Insomniac's Spidey games fizzle with fistly pyrotechnics so ill-suited to requiring you to anticipate incoming hands that Spidey's glowing head halo does it for you. In Spider-Man the first, you don't even have to consider danger until the same second you respond to it. This lets you focus your entire brain on what matters: doing stuff that makes you nod and go: "Oh yes. That's some shit Spider-Man would do".

Me when I'm being used as a comparative example to make a larger point.

But in the sequel, just knowing that a wiley thugoon might spring a parry-only punch forces a shift in priorities from "I want to do this" to "I don't want that to happen" which messes with the cadence something awful. It's so ill-fitting it feels like it emerged from a focus group, run by and consisting entirely of suits, each of them focused on suit-dazzling the other suits with the suitiest suggestions possible.

This is how so much of parrying feels to me now. It's Chris Pratt. It's Timbly Charmander. It's 20g of added bison protein in an 18g Chocolate Hobnob. I used to crackle with glee at clinching a "not today, fucko" against Ray's clanging mechasnout in Metal Gear Rising. Now I long for a game brave enough to snap my sword in half forever if I'm stupid enough to think I can deflect even a swerving bumper butt from a medium-velocity rat ambulance.

Onimusha: Way Of The Sword is not that game. It has five different varieties of not-today-fuckos you can use during a day in the life of true Edo period geezer Miyamoto Musashi, and something like four extra fucko-be-gones. You can block, dodge, super dodge, parry, and deflect, which is basically a parry with extra steps. Dodging fills an execution gauge, and parrying fills a gauge that engulfs your sword in crackling anti-fucko energy.

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30 Aug 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. Jonty and I have both been away this past week on separate work trips, leaving Brendy to operate the cranks, winches and pulleys of Jank alone. And didn't he do well? Jonty handled the summary in yesterday's Jank Mail, so I'll just add my thanks to Brendy's newborn for leaving his father with just enough mental capacity to play a multiplayer game. Astonishing. Let's round up some games writing from across the past week.

I remember when the "gamer bill of rights" was a serious proposition from a handful of developers and digital storefronts. Mothership asked a group of people to pitch ideas for what such a document might contain, tongue closer to cheek.

The right not to play a game

Just because "everyone" loves a game or it wins a bunch of awards or someone tells you that you "have" to play it does not mean you do in fact have to play it. You are no less of a "real gamer" just because you have not played a certain game. There are thousands of games that have been released over decades on a variety of platforms, which come with many

29 Aug 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank mail: Netflix and kill

This week in PC gaming

It has been a very long week in videogames, between the hundreds of games and conversations about them at Gamescom, and the single billion-dollar game that Rockstar chose to finally show off in the middle of it. As an independent media outlet we didn’t cover either of those things, though, and that’s partially a matter of free-thinking principle and also because Graham and I were both away for work so Brendy had to hold the fort. He did a grand job though, starting with taxi reports from Hell Let Loose: Vietnam.

Even for seasoned FPS players, it's easy to look at games like Hell Let Loose: Vietnam and dismiss them as a sweaty Call Of Duty for people who take a deathmatch too seriously. It's even easier to reject it for the social discomfort of having to actually talk to strangers over the internet. But this is something I love about multiplayer war 'em ups - the small, temporary friendships you forge in hellish circumstances, the micropals you make during a big push or a desperate last stand. The medic who follows you everywhere. The squad leader who says "good fuckin job boys!" when

28 Aug 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

And what we are playing

Gamescom took place this week, but that didn't stop people releasing new game after new game. I could have packed this list with triple the usual number, but I am but one frail and achy person, and so you get just three.

You can correct this failing yourself by letting us know what you're playing this weekend in the comments.

Blood Dungeon

A big wyrm, some satyrs, and a lil guy clinging to a wall as he shoots the wyrm.

I wrote about Blood Dungeon, the autoshooter from the maker of Nidhogg, back when the demo came out. I wrote about its manic beauty and its significance as a work of art by a creator who has refined their distinctive voice over decades of releases. I did not mention that the player is pooped out of a butt in the ceiling every time they return to the hub world. Now I have.

Folk Emerging

A close view of some hexy settlements and dense UI amid a sandy environment.

It's been a long while since I've fallen for a 4X game, and I suspect something smaller and more focussed might be my route back into the genre. Folk Emerging could be it. It's about leading nomadic tribes through the Stone Age, in which you must juggle family politics and deal with brand new inventions like subsistence farming and

27 Aug 2026 By Alice Bell Podcast

Total Playtime: Text Adventure 2 - Heaven's Vault

A good videogame book!?

Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week's episode is exclusive to paying subscribers: you may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.

Behold the first episode of Text Adventure's second series. It's only fitting that our video game book book club forces us to contort our titles into the malformed and over-punctuated shape of many video game titles! We very much put our best foot forward this week with Heaven's Vault 1: The Loop, by Jon Ingold, earning the highest single score a book has gotten in this series.

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26 Aug 2026 By Sin Vega Feature

House Of The Dying Sun rescued space from the nerds, but we let it go again

This machine kills traitors

This is not a war. There is no glory or prize to be won, no victory to be had. There are no gods to satisfy or rewards to covet. There is nothing to gain. You are not here to save the galaxy or prevent the apocalypse. There is a truth, but it is not holy. It is beyond holy. It is this:

Twelve traitor lords remain.

House Of The Dying Sun begins with an imperative tolling bell, and can only end in ruin. That is your explicit purpose. It tells you upfront, not with a cutscene or Sim Cameraman prologue, but in black and white, with intoxicating immediacy.

Levels open with thrumming drums and full engines warping you in to the target, under a beautiful classic font declaring dramatic titles like "Vengeance at Ember Field" and "Slaughter at Horuus Gate", in keeping with its almost 1970s filmic energy. Suns blot out enemies. An ally flies through the fire of missiles you shot down. One HUD marker doesn't rotate with you, and that feels better. Every level is a careful diorama, a stage.

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25 Aug 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Reviews

Vholume review

Who runs this city?

A good parkour game is a gauntlet of faith. You follow the flow of a city designed by some invisible hand: paving stones tilted at angles suggestive of a left turn, a warm light inviting you into a distant doorway, some plank of corrugated scrap extended toward an unseen edge. You are chasing a breadcrumb trail, except you don't always know what's crumb and what's dirt. Over and over, you leap without looking. Sometimes that means you die. But, when it's done right, you feel like you are predicting the future mere milliseconds ahead of time.

The best levels of Vholume make me feel like a clairvoyant with springs for legs. The worst feel like a brief test of my faith, nothing more. The protagonist of this wall-running platformer will often wheeze as if they're running out of breath. At the end of one run, I realised I had been holding my own lungs for the two full minutes it took me to hit the dark doorway that marks the finish line. This game is such a rush, it will deprive you of oxygen.

Thirty-one levels, a wall run, and a

24 Aug 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

A ride in the war taxi

The Commander Goes Zapping in Hell Let Loose: Vietnam

"War is fun," says the commander. "You get to shoot things."

The radio is cracking heavy static, the helicopter blades are whud-whud-whudding over our heads, bullets are whipping past, or plinking loudly against the chopper's hull. The commander in the seat next to me is still speaking but I can only hear snippets of what he says. It's almost impossible to make out the rest of his rubber-banding words.

"It's -— and yeah -— sometimes you -— shot at -— that's -— "

I'd like to say this is an atmospheric feature of Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, the latest multiplayer shooter to be set in the jungles of 1960s Vietnam. But it's really just the game's comm systems buckling under the pressure of a war sim that relies on wall-to-wall chatter. The pilot, who has a clearer radio channel with me, translates.

"Basically, he says: war is fun!"

Like the conflict it's based on, the warfare in Hell Let Loose: Vietnam is not symmetrical. The two factions don't have matching abilities. US players can fly helicopters and drop napalm strikes. The North Vietnamese have tunnel systems and better camouflage. The first Hell Let Loose, set during WWII, had the same hardcore tactical battling and quick deaths. But the factions generally used the same explodey technologies and methods of war. Here, each side has a distinct flavour. The sound of choppers either makes you anxious or relieved.

Down on the ground, you either can't see ten feet ahead of you for jungle bushes, or you can see for miles (and be sniped for miles). You can take a boat downriver, but a dozen muzzle flashes might erupt from the bushes at any moment. You almost never see the person who riflewrecks you from a mysterious position in an abandoned fishing village. The safest place, surely, is a hundred feet up in the sky.

A trail of white smoke whooshes past our helicopter.

"Wow," says the pilot. "Rude."

The commander stirs next to me. "Was that an RPG?" he asks.

"Uh, maaaybe," says the pilot cheerfully.

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