Jank (Page 7)

15 Jul 2026 By Alice Bell Reviews

You deserve better literature than Dungeon Crawler Carl

Demand more from books inspired by videogames

With the benefit of hindsight, I should have read the dedication in Dungeon Crawler Carl as 'HERE THERE BE MONSTERS'. What it actually says is the following:

This version of Dungeon Crawler Carl is dedicated to the star of one of the greatest, most inspiring, most amazing survival stories of our time.

Fiona.

Fiona the hippo.

Yes, I am dedicating this book to a goddamned hippopotamus.

Sorry, Mom.

It really has everything. A zaniness hovering between being insecure and smug. Graceless repetition because the prose wasn't structured properly in the first instance. A self-conscious swearword to indicate that what's happening is funny. A gesture toward emotion as an afterthought. My god, if it isn't a perfect distillation of the whole book.

I picked up Dungeon Crawler Carl on a recommendation from multiple people I trust, and now will never trust again. It's the first entry in a LitRPG series that is both self-published online (visionary auteur Matt Dinniman has kept the digital rights, an incredibly baller move) and now trad-published in book stores.

Dungeon Crawler Carl has an air of originality because, while LitRPGs have been popular in countries like Japan, Korea and Russia for a while, this time it's about a cool white American dude. Our titular Carl is 6'3", jacked, and weirdly defensive about having been a member of the Coast Guard. Without warning every building on Earth and anyone inside them is destroyed - "splattered into dust" at "approximately 2.23 am", as we are told on literally page one, and if you think that's another sign of bad things to come, you're correct.

"The times when Dinniman writes something dense with subtext, it's because he's done so accidentally"

Objectively incorrect use of words and their meanings aside, the set up is fine, I guess. The middle of the planet is transformed into a multi-layered videogame-esque dungeon by the genocidal aliens now in charge. Carl, along with a prize showcat called Princess Donut belonging to Carl's ex-girlfriend, and several million other members of humanity, take their chances in the dungeon. Their exploits as Crawlers are televised across the galaxy in a daily reality TV show.

The LitRPG genre leaves in the tedious grinding and stat fiddling that you do in a videogame, but sort of excise from your memories of playing it. In Dungeon Crawler Carl, your brain has to suffer through multiple paragraphs like:

"She also received a dozen Heal scrolls from a Silver Survivor's Box. That one was rewarded to her because she'd ended a boss battle with less than 5% of her health. The scrolls were good to have because there was no countdown between reading each one, and even better yet, we could use the scrolls on each other."

I didn't have a specific quote in mind then, I just opened the book at random. There's even a supporting character who's the head of the Tutorial Guild and may as well be called Basil Exposition. Info dumps like this happen once a page or so, sometimes in the middle of the universally boring fights, and are all delivered in this repetitive, basic style with very few sentences of varying length. It's leaden.

More than that, it's dead. Nothing comes alive, adjectives are rare and a vanishing few of them are sensory. The dungeon is "dark" and "big". Goblins turn up a lot in this book, and the first Carl meets look "much like they did in movies and video games." Masterful stuff. I will give Dinniman an amount of credit for coming up with a reason why the dungeon is full of references to Earth pop-culture. And at least he shows more restraint than Ernest Cline.

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14 Jul 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

Make a collage with old magazines in your browser

Ask a grown-up to help with the scissors tool

We love a good internet toy here in the Jank yard. Clipart.studio is a time-wastin' gizmo by designer Sami Smith that lets you cut out bits from old magazine PDFs saved in the Internet Archive, and stick them together on a canvas in a work of collage art. The digital-only downside is that you cannot later peel the dried PVC glue off your fingers like a big snake molting its skin in the desert. Ah, well.

The magazines are many. You can clip the curls out of Cosmo, the singers out of Smash Hits, and the parasites out of Popular Science. But of course there is a solid core of 1990s-2000s videogame mags to rip and/or tear from. PC Zone, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Nintendo Power, and Play are the ones that show up the most. You can also add your own PDFs to snip from, if you are so inclined.

The tools are simple - slice and dice, click and drag, undo, and shift the clipouts from front to back. Export your final collage when you're done and show off to friends who I guarantee will not care about your finished masterwork but will care

14 Jul 2026 By Jay Castello Reviews

The Incident At Galley House review

A rebuilt machine

To investigate the deaths at the Galley house, you'll first have to familiarise yourself with the machine. By inputting a time code, location, and the reference numbers for the people present, you'll be able to view that moment. Or, more accurately, hear it. Although you can occasionally pick out clues from the background art, and assign avatars to the hazy shadows once you've figured out which of the photographs in your inventory they correspond to, it's most important to pay attention to what they're saying.

The whole mystery unspools in these aural moments: people arguing and suddenly discovering dead bodies, the thunderstorm a constant accompaniment. It's a game that is predominantly a listening experience. Which is why it's surprising that The Incident at Galley House began life as Type Help, a text-based browser game.

Although the puzzling itself has been expanded, this transformation is predominantly a case study in the power of UI. I found Galley House's story to be solidly "pretty good," but combined with this upgraded presentation - the clunk of the strange machine, the generator flickering out every so often, the voice acting and audio design - I spent plenty of time genuinely creeped out. This isn't something I've experienced while simply reading, but it's also not something I've experienced in any of the other games that Galley House is inspired by, like Return of the Obra Dinn or The Roottrees are Dead.

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13 Jul 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Character Select

Max Payne vs Octodad vs The Flood vs Dog vs SkiFree Yeti

Let endless battle end

You may remember the brutal massacre that occurred while I was on paternity leave. In the first season of Character Select, we pitted heroic game characters against one another in bloodthirsty brawls and let you argue on their behalf. After careful review of the duels (and comments in support of the various fighters) we can confirm at least five beloved fictional personalities have perished, although the true death toll is probably closer to 50. (Spoilers: the entire population of Stardew Valley has been killed.)

The survivors are listed in the headline above, however, keen-eyed readers may notice the presence of yet more "vs" between them - the dread abbreviation. Well done. You have discovered the truth: the great killing spree is not over. In this gore-soaked season finale, those who remain must now face off in a ferocious free-for-all. Only one will walk away. You, reader, will decide who.

Before we crack on to the battle royale. Let's review the destruction that came before. Thanks to all Jankers who commented with their version of events. In the fight summaries below we've selected our favourite battle outcomes from your collective twisted imaginings. Crowdsourced violence, it's

12 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. Wall Week has ended, bringing to a close what began as a dumb joke and then wandered, article by article, into something surprisingly sincere. I feel that this is very Jank, as much as anything can be said to be "very Jank" when this website has existed for only six months. Thanks to all who signed up to support what we're building here. Now let's find some other good writing from across the rest of the internet.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced released this past week. For PC Gamer, Morgan Park played both it and the original back-to-back to produce a review that digs into the granular differences between them, and the question marks over remaking a game that's not that old and holds up quite well.

Ubisoft spent a generation transforming Assassin's Creed from a stealth-action power fantasy into a loot-driven RPG with spammy combat, and only now is it trying to make amends. Resynced feels like Ubisoft teaching itself how to make a proper Assassin's Creed again, and graded on that curve, it's quite good.

For Unwinnable, Jay Castello looks back at ten years

11 Jul 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: X-termination

This week in PC gaming

We are approaching the end of Wall Week, our celebration of carefully created barriers to mark the erection of our own. Graham mused on how a youth spent making Half-Life maps taught him the sheer miraculousness of any game being released. Due to a communication error, Brendy reviewed Wall-E. I mused on the PS360’s waist-high era, we published the definitive list of the best walls in games, and Jeremy Peel considered how Dunwall’s walls set you free.

Outside the well, we maintained our free-to-read regulars: our roundup of the best game writing, highlighting the new games you can play this week, the fortnightly Total Playtime podcast – which this week managed to discuss an actual papal schism rather than our ongoing fictional one – and of course this newsletter.

Outside Jank entirely, Necrosis Week was followed by Bloodbath Week, as Xbox stormed out of the blocks by ditching five studios and laying off 1,600 people as an opener, with a further 1,600 to leave over the rest of the year, which is having exactly the impact on morale you might expect.

The “good” news is that Double Fine and Compulsion Games

11 Jul 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Wall Week

Are you a brick or a builder?

Wall Week is over

A woman made of leaves asks you this question in City Of Muse, a little-known seaside walking sim released in 2021. "What are you: a brick or a builder?" she says. It's a question I have often remembered, from a tiny game, likely long forgotten by the few who played it.

As Wall Week comes to a close, I want to take a sincere moment at the end of our overextended joke to talk about what we are building here at Jank, and why a paywall is more than just a turnstile charging an entry fee. This article is not paywalled - you're invited in.

When we talk about videogame walls for Wall Week, we're not always thinking of them as a divider. Even our own paywall, which is as porous and reliant on good will as any other, isn't meant to be some impassable and offensive barrier. If I build a wall in Age of Empires 2, or fix a broken one with a team of multiplayer engineers in Foxhole, I'm keeping my enemies out. But when I build a castle rampart or a cabin wall in Minecraft, I'm thinking of the future,

10 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

This post is free

Wall Week, our weeklong celebration of putting up our paywall, is nearing its end. As Brendy explained, many posts will remain outside that paywall each week, including weekly regulars like this one, and including your ability to comment on those articles. We made the decision early on to make commenting free because we want Jank to feel like a community; a cool place to hang out and chat, even if you don't have the money to hand over when Brendy tries a shakedown.

So come in, pull up a chair. Tell us what you're going to be playing this weekend.

Moonlight Peaks

"I do very much enjoy getting a sense of what it is like to engage in these odd customs of your kind," says Death, to a vampire.

Ever since I completed Pokémon Pokopia, I've been looking for a new game to give me errands to do. Moonlight Peaks looks like it could be that game, as a supernatural life sim in which you play as a vampire, befriend the local witches and mermaids, and spend your time potion-making and, of course, growing crops and fishing.

Echoes Of Aincrad

Anime heroes brandish a glowing sword and look up and off screen.

It's been a surprise to me that there aren't more isekai videogames, given the genre's ubiquity and popularity in anime. It's especially odd given how many isekai anime are