Jank (Page 7)

09 May 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Fighting words

This week in PC gaming

This week in Jank, the big news is that Brendy launched Character Select, our new series pitting game characters in a fight to the death as decreed by the comment section. The debut bout is chemically-dependent cops, with Max Payne facing off against Harry DuBois, and the reaction has been extremely impressive.

Other things: Graham belatedly discovered that Abiotic Factor is less like DayZ and more like Pokémon Pokopia. Jeremy Peel joined our illustrious freelance roster to praise Marathon’s med drones. On Total Playtime, Nate compelled Alice and myself to pick out our preferred Gaming Pope attire, because our internal lore is already at that level after only a year of broadcasting.

Out in the wider PC gaming world, the Steam Controller sold out instantly and if you want one you need to get in line. Microsoft ditched the gaming Copilot integration which nobody liked or wanted, which I hope other companies will consider inspirational. The GameStop CEO attempted to buy eBay despite not having enough money or apparently any understanding of why that would be worth having and is now trying to meme his way out of it, which would be the most embarassing CEO move

09 May 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: A Collaboration Between Alexander McQueen and God Himself

Adventures in Papal drips

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08 May 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

We've invented commenting on the internet, so come try it

Pour one out for Brendy who, if you were paying attention, you know has now entered the hinterland of fatherhood. He is already filling Jank's team and subscriber-only Discord servers with tales of projectile pooping and photos of gamer onesies. It will be some weeks before he's able to resume his regularly scheduled videogaming, and so lets do it in his honour.

Here's three games you could play this weekend. Tell us what you are playing in the comments.

A huge purple lizard with a shell and crystal back blasters a laser from its tongue.

Alabaster Dawn

CrossCode was a masterclass in gamefeel and its developers have just released their new game in Early Access. Alabaster Dawn is another action-RPG with a heavy emphasis on exploration, and an art style that uses 3D to deliver the smoothest SNES graphics you've ever seen.

A large man crouches and shoots as a man in a long coat runs, holding two guns. Everything is pixel art.

Huntdown: Overtime

A 2D roguelite blaster in a grim cyberpunk world and a prequel to the original Huntdown, Overtime also launched in Early Access this week. This is the cyberpunk of 2000AD and Verhoeven rather than of Gibson, marked more by back alley brickwork and blood spray than gleaming chrome, so take a look if you want to gib a pixel art man.

A tree-lined road that three people are skateboarding along. Golden hour light filters through the leaves.

Mixtape

I am sick to

07 May 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Abiotic Factor is Pokémon Pokopia for a different flavour of '90s childhood

Revisit the Black Mesa region and build happy habitats for the sciencemons that live there

I'm a minor Pokémon fan compared to many of my peers, but Pokopia, its recent spin-off, has swallowed dozens of hours of my time. It contains none of the typical monster battling and instead lets players build a world the pokémon would want to live in. This requires completing an almost fractal todo list, in which every task breaks into half a dozen other tasks, until suddenly you've spent three hours tidying, planting, and building. It's hard to put the game down when any action feels like progress and there is always another drip of dopamine just a few seconds away.

I was thinking about the near-inevitable wave of PC games inspired by Pokopia that will follow in the years to come, and also wondering what other game worlds might benefit from the Pokopia treatment: that is, a rich, survival-lite experience about constructing and repairing a world we initially explored through a different lens. The answer I came up with might surprise you if you didn't read the headline of this article.

Here was my impression of Abiotic Factor when people were discussing it around its original release in 2024: it's a

06 May 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Character Select

Max Payne vs Harry Du Bois

Let endless battle commence

Welcome to season one of Character Select. How many seasons will there be? Shut up, you don't even know the rules yet.

Character Select is that thing you do with your mates when you sit around the TV watching a bad movie and one of you has a sudden attack of stonerbrain and asks: "Who would win: The Hulk or The Meg?" Except we're doing it for PC game characters and our match-ups will be funnier.

On top of pitting two videogame characters against one another in an unspecified yet likely violent form of competition, we'll also tell you what arena they'll face one another in. It is up to you, the filthy commenters, hollering from the stands of this trashy coliseum of popular culture, to decide the winner of each conflict.

I have a small stack of these face-offs prepared and ready to publish every week. I'll be honest, I invented this brawling column as a quick and dirty means of covering my article quota while I am away changing nappies on paternity leave. But don't think about that. The point is: many characters you know and love

05 May 2026 By Jeremy Peel Bits

Marathon’s med drone is for emotional support and, to a lesser extent, healing

A perma-smiling comfort on the cold surface of Tau Ceti IV

Marathon is frightening. Especially in solo mode, where the silence of rival players is so acute you can hear the blood pumping in your ears, Bungie’s extraction shooter slips into a form of unscripted survival horror. One that makes you entirely responsible for your own safety, on a world that would be awful enough without all the murderers. Have you seen the wildlife? The bugs splatter you with ichor and the birds tell on you, giving up your position to any rivals who might listen. "Caw! He’s here, lads! Grease your elbows for a knifing!"

It’s a terror that turns even the sensible visitor superstitious. Leaves you hankering, on some level beneath active thought, for a good-luck charm or totem. That’s what I realised the first time a teammate hurled a med drone in my direction. The little blocky bot made a gleeful parabola across the crags of Perimeter and settled comfortingly over my left shoulder. Some enterprising robotics engineer had tuned its digital display to show a reassuring smile - much like the face of Minecraft’s iconic creeper, but with the frown turned upside down.

The magic of the med drone is that it

03 May 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I'm a few hours late posting this today because, frankly, I was too tired last night to face putting it together. I am doing it now, on Sunday, squeezed between familial appointments. You may be doing similarly as you read this, a collection of fine writing about videogames from across the past week.

Over at Ars Technica, Kyle Orland spoke to some of the players who bought into and lost money on Legacy, Molyneux and 22cans' short-lived web3 game.

In addition to Molyneux’s usual game design bluster, though, was a newfound enthusiasm for the idea of making money from simply playing a game. “And because it’s a blockchain game, you earn,” Molyneux said at Galaverse, leaning on the last word for emphasis. “For a game designer, imagine how exciting it is to know that a game design that you’ve been working on, people will be earning money with it!”

MindsEye developers Build A Rocket Boy said that the game's DLC would contain real "evidence" of sabotage committed against them and their game. For Polygon, Giovanni Colantonio went looking.

Like MindsEye itself, all of this is painfully stupid. Blacklisted is a petty

02 May 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Controlling

This week in PC gaming

Another week has passed! We made it; good work everybody. Here on Jank, Graham gloried in the fact that emulation means that every game comes to PC eventually and proposed Peter Molyneux: Pop Star, the Disney Channel Original Movie that will never grace this timeline.

Brendy raised a virtual glass to virtual pubs, and I confirmed that Samson is both too limited and too janky to be compared to GTA 4 but I did it anyway. Take that, narrative convention. Brendy and Alice couldn’t make it to the podcast recording so Nate and I considered Microsoft’s latest strategy pivot and the number of ETs required to defeat Joe Rogan.

Out there in the wider world, Valve dished out Steam Controllers to reviewers and almost all of them said it’s great, with only some minor technical dissent. Available on Monday, and probably beyond because it doesn’t have RAM in it. Paste Games, which was briefly Endless Mode and AV Club, and eternally the first byline for a vast swathe of US games writers, was shut down which is another reason to fund independent games media.

Elsewhere, Subnautica 2 is actually happening despite everything. The developer