Bits - Jank

20 Oct 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

The Archives of Trevosa are a good place to spend a few hours

Comes with some history

The number of games is now so high, and the usefulness of search tools so low, that it’s no longer possible to conduct casual historical research. Any attempt to track the genesis of any given genre will yield only a breezy AI summary of a YouTube video on the topic that will on closer inspection have been created by somebody with an unsettling interest in phrenology, or a series of insipid best-of articles crafted exclusively to chase the final dregs of search traffic, grimly reproducing the same tired list of titles while reciting Key Search Terms like acolytes completing their rituals even as the meteorite breaks through the upper atmosphere.

I am therefore forced to rely on my own very limited experience and say that Her Story pioneered the current trend in deduction games, and The Return of the Obra Dinn set the high water mark. I nevertheless cherish The Roottrees Are Dead, which opted for a clumsy 1990s desktop as its means of discovery, a method I would still consider perfect for the form: a mix of conceptually omniscient but practically limited that’s entirely period-correct.

12 Oct 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

I love my stupid new chair

Tilt your face towards god and send your lower back into hell

My old office chair broke a year or so ago, but I resisted replacing it because I hate office chairs. I work from home and my desk is in my living room, so why should I spend a ruinous amount of money to buy a piece of office furniture that is ultimately less comfortable or appealing than the armchair or couch already in the same space. I'm tired of falling for the lies of Big Lumbar and then, in the evenings when I want to play PC games for fun, having to continue to sit in something with all the panache of my local Currys PC World.

I have spent a lot of evenings Googling things like "armchair but for a desk", "office chairs as comfortable as a couch", until I'm twenty tabs deep and my searches become ever more specific ("queen anne wingback chair with wheels for desk", "executive high back reclining office chair padding") and Reddit threads and useless AI summaries start spraying out of my uncomfortable butt. Then I found the HOMRELEXA.

It's got a stupid, all-caps brand name. It's listed on Amazon but sold and shipped by a company called "NaiSa"

09 Oct 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

Be a tiny brutalist

Mine's a pint of the hard stuff

Genres are multiplying at the rate of black mould. The survivorslikes, the tidy-uppers, the gamblotrons - they spread beyond our control. I enjoyed that library game. Now I vomit at the sight of clutter in a screenshot. This era of PC games is the equivalent of that time you casually told your mum you like figs and now every week she shows up with another 1kg bag of figs. Dried figs, rehydrated figs, fresh figs, figs with roguelite elements, figs with character customisation. Please mum! No more figs!

But sometimes a genre grows quietly and gently, far from the slopweeds. The sandbox building game has yet to sicken me. Townscaper, Tiny Glade, and Sandcastle are toys of cosy architecture. But what if you wanted a toy for harsh architecture? Here you go. Tiny Brutalism is $5 and will have you feeling like... like... okay, look, I don't know famous architect names and every time I write about brutalism I have to go look them up. I thought László Tóth was a real person. Anyway, this little videogame about building blocky concrete shapes is good.

It's straightforward. Pick a plot size (8 x 8, 12 x 12, and so

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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