Bits - Jank

03 Oct 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

Three for a tenner! Come get yer games. Three for a tenner!

Here's how to recreate the bargain buckets you remember

Consider this: you've just been handed a tenner from your grandmother. She doesn't know what the hell she's doing. She thinks you'll spend it on sweets, or put it in your piggy bank. What a fucking idiot! No, you're going to rummage through the bargain bucket at your local game shop.

Except, oh no, all the game shops are dead. That's okay, Steam is having a sale this week. The correct way to find proper deals in a Steam sale is to create your own bargain bin by fiddling with the dials and sliders of the store's search page, like a coked-up rodent messing with levers in a lab experiment. One of these has got to open the cage, right? No. The cage is capitalism. And you are trapped. The best you can hope for is for cheap videogames to come sliding down the tubes. Let me aid you in this by taking ten pounds (British, valuable, suspicious) and seeing what we could buy in the Steam Autumn sale with granny's cash.

First, let's go to the Global Top Sellers list and crank that price slider all the way down

21 Sep 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

A love letter to sci-fi corridors (written in blood on the wall)

They should really change some of these lightbulbs

I want to call Derelikt a "love letter" to sci-fi corridors, but its probably more of an affectionate PDA diary entry, quickly scribbled as alien creatures breached the doors of the sleeping quarters. Or maybe a romantic memo written in blood on the windows of the biological testing facilities. An affectionate post-it note, stuck next to a gore spattered keypad that reads: "I love you, space corridors! Anyway the code is 2000 - the year I shit myself playing a demo for Alien Resurrection."

Derelikt is still in development, but it's open to playtesters this week. So I went clattering down its metal passageways in search of my childhood. I didn't find it - you never do. But I did go "ah, that's nice" quite a lot.

The aesthetic inspirations are Alien Resurrection for the most primal of PlayStations, yes, but the attention to detail goes far beyond your average boomer shooter's post-processing shaders. The textures warp as you turn your view. Vertices snap as they reach the edge of your display. The end of a corridor is often pitch black, a recreation of the PlayStation's infamously limited draw distance. It is sci-fi

07 Sep 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Let me give my space commander a silly voice, cowards

Pick of the squeak

I have played Star Wars: Zero Company for about three hours total, and approaching a quarter of that time was spent in the character creator. This is fairly common. If I have any aspiration to spend time with a game that is equipped with a character creation tool - if I have any commitment beyond vague tourism - then I consider it essential to pick though all the options and craft something that, invariably, makes me laugh.

I would do this even if the character’s appearance is limited to a 32x32 headshot at the bottom of a stats chart, because vibe is important to me and sometimes the vibe demands an eyepatch, or high-piled set of dreadlocks, or a truly hideous jacket colour. The more serious the game, the more important this becomes: there is no text exchange about crop rotation or galactic diplomacy that cannot be improved by my character staring implacably ahead while looking like they were dressed by a five-year-old picking from the most cursed remnant rail in TK Maxx.

Sometimes I will play it straight and come up with something conventionally attractive, as long as it’s not a boring white man

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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