Feature - Jank

08 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I've been frantically laying track in front of a moving train for too long, and today is the day that changes. Today is the day I plan ahead, get things in order, and build myself a less hectic week. That or I spend too long in bed reading and then spend the rest of the day playing videogames. Hm.

Nicole Carpenter spoke to the creators of Hidden Folks for The Verge and considered the microgenre of "searching" games (their term) that have followed in its wake, including the gorgeous Lost And Found Co. which released this week.

What makes a good hidden object game, both de Jongh and Lee agree, is playtesting. You can have a great art style, clever sounds, and a nice story, but if the game doesn’t work well, it won’t click with players. “It took us years, and it was just trial and error,” Lee said. “Someone who makes a level has a very hard time understanding how difficult or easy it might be for someone else. You just have to keep workshopping and testing.” Playtesting is what made Hidden Folks so satisfying to play. De Jongh said it’s core

04 Mar 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

The 7 best salesmen in PC games

Earlier this week I earned the disdain of not only wristwatch fans but also fans of older men, in a hyper-efficient blast of upset caused simply by pointing out that Leon Kennedy is a salesman now. But maybe this was harsh. Maybe my spitting upon the practice of product placement was unfair to the salespeople of the world, who do their part to keep the global economy afloat. Afloat, like a raft made out of Coca-cola bottles and bubble wrap drifting on the great Pacific garbage patch.

By way of apology, here is a celebration of the best salesfolks in PC games.

The Merchant - Resident Evil 4

"Hello, stranger!" says this friendly, white-eyed, hooded man in an accent that is either Cockney or Australian depending on the mood of both speaker and listener. He is a decent guy, always willing to buy or sell an egg. He wears odd clothes, is extremely desirous of jewels, and suspiciously well-stocked in harmful weaponry for someone who lives so deep in a ragged and remote part of the Iberian peninsula. Typical British expat to be honest.

Chu-Chu - Quadrilateral Cowboy

There is a bit between levels in first-person hack 'em up

02 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Deadline Delivery and Deep Snow Delivery are the past and present of videogames

But both of them are its future

I initially dismissed Deadline Delivery as a mere trifle. It is a time attack driving game in which you, a monkey, must deliver three parcels before a timer runs out. You must therefore make those deliveries without slowing down, throwing the parcels from your vehicle within designated glowing circles. If the timer does run out, your truck explodes, and the monkey goes spinning through the air. You'll need to repeat and refine each short track to earn the medals that unlock future tracks, but this is no chore. Restarts are instant and it feels great to experimentally boost and power-slides until you discover the perfect racing line to take you over ramps and around oncoming traffic and shave seconds off your time.

Crazy Taxi is an obvious reference point, but Deadline Delivery also reminds me of an earlier period in PC gaming, when these kinds of light and (whisper it) casual games seemed like an integral part of the nascent indie game scene. Flashbang Studios were the masters of this stuff, I think, with games like Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, Jetpack Brontosaurus, Minotaur China Shop and Time Donkey. (I swear I'm not making these up.) There was always an animal, always

01 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I have been bone tired all week in a way that I couldn't shake until Friday morning, when I employed the best remedy for such a feeling: I got a haircut. Properly restored, I've been on top of everything ever since. Let's celebrate with some words worth reading this Sunday morning.

I've complained many times that business analysis, or some amateur impression of it, too often replaces arts and culture conversations around videogames among both journalists and the game-playing public. Mikhail Klimentov therefore gets the top spot this week for writing a thing I already agree with on that theme. Not everything is Concord:

A year and a half after its collapse, the prominence of Concord as a cautionary example represents a retreat from talking about games in favor of talking about business and marketing — a sort of rot in the culture. Has a developer successfully sold me on XYZ new game? Did the trailer rollout make sense? What’s the view count on somesuch marketing material? And how will all this redound on player counts and units moved? These aren’t my favorite subjects, and I look a bit askance at people who really care about

28 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

The demos that didn't quite make the cut in this month's Next Fest

Our big pile of leftovers

At least twice a year we feral games journalists rummage through the bins of Steam like malnourished city foxes, looking for the best demos during Next Fest. It is a ritual of survival that we sometimes loftily call an act of curation, as if we are refined museum directors and not a gang of scurrilous weirdoes seeking sustenance from pixels.

The upshot is that you readers get a few recommendations, a short list of cool stuff to keep an eye on. But what about all the demos we played that didn't quite pass our cryptic taste test? Surely that'd be equally useful. A "not all that" list. A "save yourself some time" list. Here are all the leftovers we chewed once and spat out.

Altered Alma

A pixel hero slices an enemy punk in a purple tinted cyberpunk city.

Graham: I feel bad calling this a leftover, because it's a slashy-dashy-grapply metroidvania with a cyberpunk world and dating sim elements, and it feels good to play. It's somewhat reminscent of Iconoclasts, an oft-overlooked but excellent action-platformer. The problem is that the metroidvania genre has become rapidly overstuffed. I haven't finished Silksong yet and I've barely put a dent in MIO: Memories In Orbit, both of which are obviously stellar. From the

23 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

What is your fondest memory of jank? 14 game devs tell us

A celebration of unintentional comedy in games

Jank, the website, is one month old. That's old enough to cry for attention. Which is what we've done. We gave this PC games blog its name out of fondness for broken but ambitious games. Jank is often the byproduct of game designers trying to bulldoze their way through realistic expectations. There are borked games and then there are borked games that exude raw zeal through ragdolling corpses or flying animals. When a game reaches for the sky, it sometimes turns the skybox inside out.

We aren't the only ones with fond memories of jank in videogames. To celebrate our scrappy website's continued existence, we emailed a bunch of game developers and asked them a simple question: "What is your favourite memory of jank in a game?" Here's what they said.

A vault dweller runs across the wasteland, passing a red building. — You can't walk the dog if you use fast travel.

Brendon Chung, Blendo Games

(Lead designer of Skin Deep, Quadrilateral Cowboy)

"During my playthrough of Fallout 4, the fast travel system stopped working. This meant my only mode of traversal was: walking. To get anywhere, I had to hoof it. And it was great?

"I became crazy stingy about how much stuff I was lugging around. Embarking

16 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Swansea from Mouthwashing is the best alcoholic in games

This is the bad kind of drinking contest

Apologies to all fans of Harry from Disco Elysium, but the best alcoholic in all of videogames is a hamburger-gutted spaceship engineer who spends most of his time looking simply furious. Swansea is the low-poly blue collar spaceship mechanic in sci-fi horror game Mouthwashing. He is drunk for most of the game and even becomes - at one point - a mortal threat to your life.

Yet as all other male members of the ship's crew flail around during disaster with denial, paralysis or naivety, Swansea attains a form of grim enlightenment. He is darkly honest about himself at the very end. It's the cold honesty of his alcoholism that makes him stand out among the crew.

If you don't know Mouthwashing, consider those opening paragraphs my recommendation to go play it. It's one of Jank's best games of the decade for a good reason. It takes two or three hours to play and another two or three weeks to stop thinking about. Longer, clearly, if you're an underemployed games journalist. Spoilers ahead, et cetera.

Let's sum it up for anyone who needs a reminder. You're a crew making a delivery across space. The captain, for unknown reasons, appears

13 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Finally, a car mechanic sim where your mates do all the work

Jonty and Brendy "team up" in Car Service Together

"There's nothing WRONG with the brakes on this thing, you fucker!"

I raise a car on the pneumatic lift and ignore Jonty's angry outbursts from across the garage. He has been working on that ancient red banger for a while now, swearing to himself the whole time. I raise my own four-wheeled task a little higher on the lift, pop off the oil cap and drain all the dark car bile into a funnel. Simple. Car Service Together is a good old-fashioned early access co-op jankfest, and even better when you have a car-obsessed friend to do all the hard jobs.

"This customer is getting charged 200 bucks for wasting my time," mutters Jonty.

I patiently change an oil filter.

"It's absolute bullshit that you have to take the spacer and the caliper out to change brake pads."

A red car awaits service on the floor of the garage as Jonty's character inspects a button. — Jonty knows his wipers from his windscreens - a real professional.

I lower the car on my lift and fill it up with new oil. My job is done. I saunter over to Jonty, who's still struggling with the rusty bolts on the wreck in front of him. If there was a button in Car Service Together that let me arrogantly wipe