Bits - Jank (Page 2)

21 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

Vholume demands to be played with your entire body

First-person parkour on the concrete's edge.

After an hour in Vholume, my neck aches and my legs are shaking. It's because I've been tensed like a coiled spring for the duration, racing in a first-person parkour time trial where a single mistake might cause me to fall to my death or worse, fail to break my personal best.

"First-person parkour" might bring to mind Mirror's Edge, and sure enough Vholume has the wall-running and bum-slides to go split-toe to split-toe with that cult classic. But Vholume is the work of Léonard Lemaitre (among others), one of the brothers responsible for Jank favourites Babbdi and Straftat. There's no gleaming city of glass here, only the by-now trademark brutalist architecture and water-damaged concrete that makes you feel like you're racing through an empty server of some forgotten Half-Life mod.

Vholume's current free beta contains just two tracks, and it's the basic hub world that has obsessed me for most of the past week. It's a simple circuit under grey skies, with an abyssal drop which threatens to swallow you from below. You will race around it a few times and pretty quickly achieve a time quick enough to grant you a bronze medal, at which point you will

20 Feb 2026 By Alice Bell Bits

Creature Kitchen is a fireside menace about making bigfoot breakfast

The way to a monster's heart is through its stomach(s)

Failbetter Games have described their upcoming eldritch-garden-'em-up Mandrake as having 'fireside menace'. This is a description I find pleasing, and I'm keen to blow oxygen on the flame of that term before something I find nauseating like "fluffy spookems" or "nightlight-slop" catches instead. This is most especially in light (that of a flickering, unreliable torch) of playing Creature Kitchen. It's a new-ish game where I threw PB&J sandwiches at a raccoon with the calculating expression of Jane Goodall observing a favourite gorilla.

In Creature Kitchen you materialise outside a small log cabin and use subtle video game context clues, such as written instructions, to divine that your job is to feed the titular creatures that live there. In the beginning these are recognisable, if Wednesday Addams-adjacent critters, like the aforementioned raccoon, a raven, a mouse.

You prepare meals by bish-bash-boshing ingredients in your oven, and throw them at the cryptid in question, in a paper lunch bag. When they're pleased, they provide keys to open locked cupboards or rooms elsewhere. The whole house is a strange puzzle cabinet, and it all makes sense in context, because the context also covers an infinite pantry with a poltergeist, a

18 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

I will break EVE Online's stupid AI chatbot

It literally cannot count

Some of you who've had to interact with customer service chatbots will doubtless know the joy of bullying them until you force a human to reveal themselves and usher the idiot robot away. I am the kind of sicko who loves to pick on machines. I will absolutely build a brick enclosure around delivery bots. My partner once had a vacuum bot and I would hoot with laughter every time I nudged it just so, causing it to get trapped under the sofa and say, in its sad sad robot voice: "wHeELs aRe StuCK". I just cannot help it. Many machines are morons and deserve to be mocked.

Eve Online just added an AI chatbot to "help" beginner players navigate its famously complex, intimidating and brutal MMO universe of hideous skulduggery. I am determined to break its spirit.

To give you some context, the makers of the ancient and endlessly write-about-able spaceship spreadsheet game have - as is their habit - been slurping on the hot gunge of the tech billionaire class, this time in the form of generative AI hype. While previous binges have resulted in a blockchain spinoff with crypto horse manure, this time they've focused on

15 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading.

Good morning, videogames. My father turns 80 years-old today, opening the brief four-month window in which he is precisely twice my age. If another 40-year-old wants to merge with me to also become an 80-year-old, we can then create the world's first 160-year-old. Otherwise we can just read (watch, and listen to) some fine words about videogames.

Game arts festivals are disappearing worldwide, typified by Freeplay, the oldest art games non-profit, which recently announced that they were a year away from closing down. Robert Yang wrote a blog post that gathers together the coverage and conversation that followed the Freeplay news, the reasons why events like these are struggling, and what organisers might do about it. I've worked on enough (commercial, mainstream) games events to know that it was a miracle that any of these things ever happened in the first place, where "it was a miracle" means "it was an act of enormous dedication by a village of talented, passionate, generous people who could have had an easier time doing literally anything else." Hey that's all miracles.

Mads call this "The $1000 Problem": the event size / budget that is both too big and too small. For example it might

13 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

My Retroid Pocket 6 arrived this week and I am immediately leaving on a family trip. Is this the perfect time to cosy down and play some retro classics? Oh friend. I didn't buy this thing to play games on it. I bought it so I could spend countless evenings tinkering with frontends, boxart, and metadata. Should I ever get the device set up just to my liking, it will be going straight in a drawer to be forgotten about. Fingers crossed everything is as fiddly and time-consuming as I think it should be, or I'm going to have to buy an AYN Thor as a second project.

You might be built different. You might want to actually boot up a game. Here's a few you could try - and tell us what you are playing in the comments.

A side-on cut-through of a museum, showing six rooms. — I'm already stealing lost cultural artifacts on my Retroid Pocket 6.

Relooted

Everyone who has watched Indiana Jones or played Tomb Raider has had the idea: what if instead of stealing from foreign historical sites, we were taking back plundered artifacts from museums and repatriating them to their origins? Relooted is exactly that: a 3D sidescroller from a South African developer

12 Feb 2026 By Jon Hicks Bits

Quarantine Zone: The Last Check makes me feel dead inside

Sorry mate, we're full

The seed at the heart of this game is the same as Papers, Please: you're manning a checkpoint and deciding who to let in. In this case, it’s for a zombie epidemic, so the checking is of symptoms and luggage rather than paperwork, and it’s all in full 3D, and the act of checking is merely the first step in what turns out to be a lot of different tasks and challenges which feel like they have been steadily layered on top of something that would have been more engaging had it been simpler. Instead, you get a busywork lifesim that’s surprisingly short on character, at least for the handful of hours I played it.

It all begins with triaging each person through the door. Your choices aren’t simply pass or reject; you have to send people to the safety of camp, the quarantine zone or the incinerator. In what turns out to be an early symptom - pun not intended - of the game’s problems, this is a choice with no emotional weight whatsoever. Occasionally you’ll get a fleeting word of thanks or uncertainty as they’re escorted to the killing chamber,

10 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

I wish videogame culture would take more cues from readers

It's time to ditch the release cycle and select what we play via more interesting constraints.

The book readers have it figured out. I listen to book podcasts and follow a lot of (I hate this word) bookstagrammers, and the turnover of a new year is the best time to do either of those things. This is because they're all reviewing their reading goals for the year that was and the year to come. Did they finish the number of classics they'd hoped? Did they finish the bibliography of Ballard novels? And will next year be the year they really commit to #JanuaryInJapan, when all over the world people dedicate themselves to reading translated fiction from the country?

I wish we did more of the same in videogames. Our equivalent discourse gets as far as ranking the best games of the year that was, and then immediately moves on to anticipating the next year's new releases, pre-emptively stuffing our backlogs with games we'll rue not having had the time to play when the next year draws to a close. Couldn't we set ourselves some more interesting constraints?

The problem - I don't think I'm blowing anyone's mind here - is in part that videogames culture is so commercial. Publishers make money by selling you something new,

08 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading.

Good morning, videogames. Stretch at the knees, spread your toes, and feel the brushed cotton ensconcing you like a big toasty cinnamon bun... Uh oh. Gotta read some good reads from across the week.

Obsidian released three games last year - an absurd number from a single studio in the modern era. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier visited the studio in the aftermath as it attempts to change its development processes to make games more quickly and cheaply.

Last year the developer released three games—a rare and impressive achievement for a studio of its size—but two of them failed to meet sales forecasts set by Obsidian’s parent company, Microsoft Corp. “They’re not disasters,” Urquhart says. “I’m not going to say this was a kick in the teeth. It was more like: ‘That sucks. What are we learning?’”

Stardew Valley is ten years old. IGN's Rebekah Valentine spoke to developer ConcernedApe about the game's success and his future.

So I asked you about big positive moments in the last 10 years. What about challenging times? Is there any moment in the last 10 years of Stardew that you recall as being exceptionally difficult or frustrating?

Barone: I think