Jank (Page 9)

04 Jul 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Necrosis Week

This week in PC gaming

It’s been a quiet seven days on Jank, befitting the summer months. In a token sop to world events Graham extolled the virtues of watching the World Cup in first-person care of the BBC’s interactive replays, enabling you to experience first-hand whatever it is that people are mad at Ronaldo for. Brendy chatted with some devs to understand his love of the command line, with reference to both Duskers 2.0 and foundational PC fandom text Hackers (1995).

The newly-integrated Total Playtime considered the dark art of game reviews, and we didn’t even get round to scoring or being extremely mean about Starfield but we did reveal Nate’s games journalism origin story so that’s your subscription value right there. And What You Could Play has once again provided three recommendations from Graham and many more from our excellent commenters.

Beyond these fetching yellow walls it has been Necrosis Week at Xbox, the die-off starting with extremities like IO’s fantasy game and then racing up towards more significant limbs like Arkane and Undead Labs, which are marked for as-yet-uncertain surgery on Monday. The company cheerily asserts that it’

03 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Play a game, while they last

The Steam summer sale continues, which means there's still a relative paucity of new game releases. There's nothing inherent in this weekly feature that requires the three games I pick to be new, but still I have rummaged around behind the sofa to pick three relatively recent games that seem worth your time.

As always, tell us what you are playing in the comments below.

A 2D platformer pixel art world. It is dark and has strange mushrooms. "Get away!" is written in the middle of the screen.

Casualties: Unknown demo

This is a demo I've had open in a browser tab since its release back in April. Delve into caves on alien planets in search of lost cargo, and deal with the strange, hostile environments you find. I'm most interested in this because it has "simulated limb and cardiovascular systems" that require you to fight infections and apply bandages to body parts in order to survive injury. I love a granular wounding system.

Some sort of plant guy is using abilities in third-person on a sandy planet against distant purple enemies.

Voidling Bound

A "creature collector", but far from a Pokémonlike. This looks like a third-person Risk Of Rain 'em up, in which you find and hatch alien creatures, cross-breed and evolve them with Spore-style body-part combinations, and then directly control one of your choice in wave-based combat. That combat is

02 Jul 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Under Review

We are all made of stars

Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, formerly funded by Patreon. Every two weeks we publish a backer-only episode hosted by Alice Bell, Nate Crowley, Jonty and sometimes Brendan although he was still on paternity leave when we recorded this one. You can listen to this and all previous Patreon-exclusive episodes by subscribing to Jank.

This week is a backer-only episode, which in the recording we still describe as for Patreons because we hadn’t agreed the Jank union yet. The subject is the internet’s favourite source of eternal argument: game reviews. How do they happen, how can they be wrong, and what lessons have we learned from them? The answers are, in order: hastily, no, and very few. Join myself, Alice and Nate to work this out at length.

This episode includes some more-than-usually ropey audio from me (sorry, we think we’ve fixed this but we have a few more episodes to get through) Nate’s games journalism origin story, and a massive picture of Brendy (figurative). Plus: a dead man’s Fallout 76 shoes, how long you have to play a game for, and somehow nothing about actual scoring which you’d have thought would have taken up most of the runtime. This is in itself a valuable lesson about not judging something based on its presumed contents, but we also get in some bitching about review embargoes so in many respects this is exactly what you’re expecting.

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30 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

The World Cup is best in first-person

The BBC are offering interactive 3D replays of every match

I am always watching football. Premier League, Champions League, La Liga, or whatever dusty field is being streamed on FIFA Plus; I do not care, I will watch it if it is football.

Naturally, I'm currently watching the World Cup. The only surprise is how often I'm watching it in first-person.

As part of the tournament, the BBC launched the FIFA World Cup 3D Experience (UK only). "3D experience" is one of those cursed phrases, conjuring expectations of a blurry Ronaldo JPG pasted on a wall in Second Life, but what they actually mean is: you can watch a replay of every single match of the World Cup in motion captured 3D. It's remarkable.

Earlier this evening, Norway beat Ivory Coast in the round of 32, and so you can now watch it in 3D in your browser. It's synced with the BBC's audio commentary, lets you overlay the pitch with shotmaps and formation stats, and best of all lets you move the camera around. That means you can watch Amad Diallo's 74th minute equaliser through Diallo's eyes as he jinks past defenders, or from the goalkeeper's perspective as the ball

29 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

I love the command line

Open article.txt

I love typing weird words in the dark. The command line interface is an archaic curiosity to some, or a desperate measure - an obsidian prompt invoked by troubleshooting articles when something on your PC has gone terribly wrong. But for me it's an invitation to an invisible realm of circuitry and verbs. I thank the cybergods that plenty of game developers have a similar fascination.

For example, Duskers 2.0 was announced during the summer games dump, a long overdue sequel where the simple typing of instructions to glitching robots is the only weapon you have against an alien bestiary of unseen threats. The command line, when done well, is enough to hang a whole sci-fi horror universe upon. It's like groping around in a dark room, with language as your only limb.

"The command line allowed us to make Duskers so much more atmospheric," says Tim Keenan, founder of Misfits Attic. "It forced the player to 'speak' to the drones in their language, reinforcing the idea that you are alone and the drones you're talking to are cold tech that require you to conform your speech and thoughts to their way of communicating.

28 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking.

Good morning, videogames. I am a little late with The Lie-In today, such that it is no longer morning as this goes live. This is because I met up with Jonty in fleshworld on Friday night and we filled ourselves with the devil's liquid. The regret on Saturday was overpowering. Now it is Sunday and I am reborn via the medium of links to good videogame writing.

Star Fox released this past week. I am currently resisting the urge to buy it, at least until I've completed a couple of other Switch 2 games that sit in front of it in the queue. For now, I enjoyed Chris Schilling's review for Eurogamer.

Conscious as I am that memory is the most unreliable of narrators, I don't recall feeling quite so exhilarated by some of these stages. Katina's mothership is more imposing than ever, spitting out fighters by the dozen. Sector X's derelict base feels enormous as you pick your way through its ruins. Take the warp route on Meteos and your destination is positively kaleidoscopic, a proper feast for the eyes. It's not too much of a stretch to suggest this is

27 Jun 2026 By Jon Hicks

Jank Mail: Everything is expensive

This week in PC gaming

The big Jank news this week is that we officially have formally merged with Total Playtime, which means that (a) we have an official podcast but (b) it’s one that has been here the whole time. A warm welcome to the Total Playtime Patreon backers who have joined us on the site and in the Discord - if you have not moved your Patreon subscription over, you have two weeks to do so.

Graham dedicated this week to iconoclasm, marking the debut of the Steam Machine with a demand that Valve make the Steam Deck smaller, less powerful and cheaper, and the brouhaha over the ability to pre-order GTA 6 to share his core belief that you should not pre-order games. Brendy highlighted some of the hundred-plus new Quake maps that have been created to mark the game’s 30th anniversary, and mourned the death of his unfinished cat game, thanks to Epic’s decision to give up on the Blueprints coding platform.

On the newly-integrated Total Playtime, Brendy returned from the parenting wilderness to opine on the news of the week, including what was then the most recent Microsoft calamity, AI again, and Nate’

26 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

The Steam Summer sale is underway, which means you may be playing the ancient game of, Do I Really Need To Buy This Now Or Am I Merely Seeking Dopamine. It's a surprisingly popular game considering the answer is always the same. It's dopamine. You already own dozens of games you haven't played, right?

Here are three new games through which you could seek dopamine this weekend.

A bipedal mech in a grey street, viewed in first-person with a gun in the player's hands. — From the developers of Splitgate.

Empulse

You might never get a Titanfall 3, but Empulse looks like a pretty good consolation. It's a 6v6 multiplayer first-person shooter with wall-running, grapple hooks and pilotable mechs. Its unique idea - or at least, the idea it borrowed from a game other than Titanfall - is paint bombs which you can throw down to apply effects to surfaces, creating faster movement, bigger leaps, and stickiness.

The inside of a fridge, where a little sushi guy is washing mold. Some rotten eggs are nearby. — Imagine how much more time I'd have for writing on Jank if this guy lived in my house.

Moldwasher

There are so, so many games about tidying up in the wake of PowerWash Simulator, but Moldwasher is at least visually distinct by being in isometric 2D. Better yet, you take control of a tiny nigiri sushi,