Bits - Jank

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.

16 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

The Witch's Bakery demo got me out of a gaming slump

The demo is available now ahead of release in August

I've been feeling sort of listless lately. I want to be deeply engrossed in something and I'm currently not. My attempts to burrow inside a new game have been rebuffed several times in a row, and by the fourth or fifth time I abandon a new game within the first 30 minutes, I start to lose the will to try another. Book lovers talk a lot about being in a "reading slump", a minor malady that's often resolved by reading something short or re-reading an old favourite. When in a gaming slump, I often do the opposite, seeking out larger and more labyrinthine games as my desperation for absorption grows. This is a mistake.

The Witch's Bakery arrived at just the right moment. The demo, available in the ongoing Steam Next Fest, does not require any burrowing on the part of the player. Its delights are on the surface.

I mean, just look at it. Looking at it is most of the pleasure.

Lunne is a witch who has moved to Paris to open a bakery with her magical associate, a talking cat named Orio. You control her days and nights: serving customers their desired

15 Jun 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Bad Magpie develops the bad-bird canon with more tools in a weirder world

Angry Bird (singular)

Amid the lavishly detailed third-person gore of the larger summer showcases, the debut of Bad Magpie in the Xbox showcase was a welcome change: a cartoony style, cheery colours and a heartstring-tugging tableau of an injured bird left behind by its flock, with a slightly demonic twist when said bird picked up a burning log and torched its bucolic environment.

Having played it, I can confirm that the game is more or less exactly what it looks like: a mildly unhinged approximation of Untitled Goose Game which gives its titular bird some more inventive puzzles and a series of tools with which to solve them. And there is quite a lot of setting things on fire, too, at least in the section I played.

It quickly becomes apparent that Bad Magpie is a more fantastical affair than House House’s debut. While the goose had a perfectly-animated strut across a perfectly stereotypical English village, the magpie has a relentless hop through a more peculiar setting. Flowers wear beatific smiles, trees wear blank faces, cheery rodents gather to play, and the narrative calls for you to collect meteorite shards for a fallen star, to be delivered

08 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

It costs £7 to boot orcs off a cliff

It's all kicking off

Fatekeeper is deeply unfinished. Ladders warp you from the bottom to the top, menu items are plastered with "WIP", and there's an NPC smithy who hammers on steel without emitting a single "klang" sound effect. There is an big lizard with a saddle, but you cannot ride it (it says "Press E to Pet" the megalizard but there's no petting animation). In so many ways, this sword-swinging first-person RPG is a perfect example of eurojank released in a state of panic. I cannot honestly recommend it, notwithstanding the following counterpoints:

It has a kick button; it is seven pounds.

Well, nine pounds if the launch deal has run out by the time you've read this. This is basically Dark Messiah of Might and Magic dragged kicking and screaming and on fire into the light of 2026. It is made by a small team that have somehow maintained a blockbuster studio's backbreaking passion for placing thousands of tiny, hyperrealistic pebbles. I am not joking, it is obsessed with perfectly rendering tiny rocks. Also, you have a talking rat as a best friend.

It is not a polished game, except in the way that