Bits - Jank

12 Aug 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

Sandcastle is an instant splashback to childhood

It's on my bucket list

I have long dreamt of this game. The elevator pitch is so simple and straightforward that it was an inevitability, and yet it has taken years for someone to do the premise justice. Sandcastle is a sandbox game in the most literal sense - all you do is build a sandcastle as the tide washes in and out, slowly eroding the walls and turrets of your small fortress.

You get buckets, spades, bits of old wood. There is no goal. You are a kid on the beach and nobody is coming to put more sunscreen on you and interrupt your building efforts.

I barely need to describe it any further. You get the entire idea from the video above. There are different types of wall to build (do you like your crenellations in classic or gothic flavour?) along with various sizes of sand bucket, and a bunch of decorative trinkets to save from the waves. Miniature tiki torches, umbrellas, cool shells, that sort of thing. Glass bottles will wash up and you click on them to unlock new building tools, like a handy trowel or a neat little roller that will smoosh everything flat.

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08 Aug 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

A Backrooms movie? No, I want a waterpark inspired by Pools

Waterslide into my DMs

My hometown swimming pool had this one weird corridor. It was a long, tiled hall from the men's changing room to the main pool. This narrow corridor housed an ankle-deep pool of water, which you stepped down into, went on about two or three metres, and then you stepped out. I think the idea was that your feet are disgusting and must be cleansed before they are allowed to meet other feet. Whatever the rationale, this footbath came to feel like a ritual. A hoofwade before you plunged in proper, a minor something to pass through on your way to better water. It gave a sense of anticipation to this long wet hall. The sound of laughter and whistles echoed from the far end, and to get to those sounds you had to splosh through a rectangular puddle full of concentrated foot cells. Gross, a bit creepy, but also sort of fun.

That swimming pool is gone now. They bulldozed it and built a new one the next town over. But I thought of its weird hallway more than once as I waded through the eerie and abandoned megaleisure complex of Pools. It is suggested this place is a mysterious and sinister purgatory, but I would 100% visit it in real life.

Pools is a walking simulator from 2024 based on the internet fad of "liminal space", the same uncanny architectural Reddit fuel that spawned the Backrooms. You wake up in an echoing and dripping waterworld and are forced to explore its labyrinth of swimming pools. It is a cathedral to chlorine. The sound design is incredible. Walk from one tightly flooded tunnel into a huge cistern with towering pillars and you can hear the entire atmosphere change. Sure, this is a first-person wanderabout for stoned architecture students, but it's also just a good soak for the senses. It is the closest I have come to feeling wet through a screen.

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05 Aug 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

The spirit of tower defence Flash games is alive in the 120,000 orcs I just killed

It's not easy being green paste on the floor

Hello to all fans of watching sand hypnotically pass through the bottleneck of an hourglass, I come to you with a gift. Sir, We Have An Orc Problem is a snacky kill 'em all about fending off a flood of little green murderers with lasers, flamethrowers, and cannons. There are so many of the wee freaks that they move like the particles of a physics-based fluid. It is pleasing to look at even before you find the choke points of each level and blast each small pillager into bloodbits with a mortar barrage.

It's cheap, it's chewable, and it reminds me, in the best possible way, of a compulsive Flash game that would have swept over every PC in my secondary school like a greasy, green plague of wicked idleness. Please, look at these runny GIFs and tell me you are not intrigued.

It is classic tower defence in many ways. You place turrets 'n' Tesla coils and try to stem the flow of attackers before they cross a threshold and slurp up all your health. You get extra abilities to help out in a pinch. You can call in an airplane strafing run. You

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

09 Jul 2026 By Jeremy Peel Wall Week

Dishonored’s Wall of Light is built to control, but teaches you how to be free

We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it… or can we?

Getting directions in a city devastated by plague and gang warfare is an alarming business. Excuse me, sir, how might one reach Holger Square, and the office of the High Overseer?

“It’ll be a rough trip,” says Samuel the boatman. “Used to be you’d go straight up Clavering Boulevard, but now it’s not so easy. City Watch still holds the bigger streets and they’ve set up those Wall of Light checkpoints. A man walks through one of those and he ends up burned to a crisp.”

Good gracious, the things they can do with whale oil these days. Sure enough, a banner hangs above the ancient gate that breaks up the Boulevard: ‘THE BOLDEST MEASURES ARE THE SAFEST’. Beneath it, a 16-beam floodlight illuminates the cobbles. And beneath that, a deceptively clear passage, beset by ominous cables and machinery. Through the gap, the City Watch passes unharmed; anyone else is vaporised instantly.

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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

19 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

I have crashed a plane into Google HQ, oh well

What a terrible accident

Google have released a flight sim. Or, to be more accurate, they've made an experimental Google Earth-based flight sim into a toy you can play in a web browser. The view is taken over with the glowing green lines of a classic flight HUD. You control pitch and yaw with arrow keys (but it works better with your mouse) and heave your thrust up 'n' down with the PageUp and PageDown keys. It is as if you are flying a plane. Wow.

You can visit incredible places in Google's sky bus, such as Mountain View, California. A beautiful municipality, home to many large technology corpor– hang on, something is... oh no, would you look at that. We're losing altitude, the Aerogoog is plummeting. Mayday? I think we say mayday. We're on a collision course with – oh my, what are the chances – somebody should do something, oh heavens, what terrible luck.

The tumbling of my virtual airtube into the headquarters of the world's biggest magic phonebook may cause some alarm among sensitive readers. Please, do not be afraid. Crashing planes in flight simulators is one of the simplest and most ancient joys of PC gaming.

17 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

Blood Dungeon is the future games deserve

The demo is the best freeware game from 2010 you've ever played

Blood Dungeon is the kind of game that makes me want to simply repeat "BLOOD DUNGEON! BLOOD DUNGEON! BLOOD DUNGEON!" for 300 words and call this post done. It's the kind of game that felt like the future of the art circa 2010: a work with, regardless of team size, a clear authorial voice; with simple pixel art which seems to fizz; with ultraviolence and verve and arcade flair; with a sense of humour and an economy of design.

None of these things are a surprise. Blood Dungeon is the work of (among others) Mark Essen, the creator of Nidhogg, which I first played in 2010. His work felt like the future of the art then and it still does now.

For all Blood Dungeon feels like the product of a simpler era of freeware game design, it's also tied to indie gaming's most modern expression: the autoshooter. Like Vampire Survivors, your challenge here is to avoid enemies and kite them around while your weapons carry out their task automatically. This is married to a platformer in which you stick to every surface, letting you clamber up walls, hang from ceilings, and balance along tightropes with ease.