Feature - Jank

11 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Let us discover a new world

With insight from the developers of Mina The Hollower, Spelunky 2, Citizen Sleeper, and Tales From Off-Peak City

I have discovered a crab that cuts off its own eyes. It was a small moment in the warm waters of Subnautica 2, but it reminded me why I loved the first game so much. This crab has regenerating eyestalks that mimic the anemones of the seabed. "If the stalks grow too long," says a lore blurb about the critter, "the clowncrab will trim them to avoid drawing attention." Every animal has a note like this, earned when you scan them - a growing encyclopedia the player is encouraged to build to help discover the world around them.

In a fluffy way, every game is about discovery - you are finding out the rules of a world as you go along. In a non-fluffy way, some games are shit at this, and others are masterful. Inspired by a single crab, I've spoken to a handful of devs on this topic. How do the makers of Spelunky, Mina The Hollower, Citizen Sleeper, and Moves Of The Diamond Hand make sure their worlds are worth discovering? And do I reckon Subnautica 2 has hit the mark?

"The best thing a game can do to create a

09 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

12 upcoming games that give me hope for the future

Triple-A showcases are the thief of joy, but luckily we secured joy to your belt with a wallet chain

Not-E3 and its exhausting cavalcade of marketing showcases has drawn to a close, leaving behind the hangover of disdain and regret I feel every year. Do I even like videogames anymore? Did I ever? How could anyone possibly appreciate this dour medium? Let me summarise the blockbuster games thus: Coca-Cola announced new Coke flavours for the Coke drinkers, Pepsi announced new Pepsi flavours for the Pepsi drinkers, and those of us in desperate need of a sip of water rasped for it all to end.

Do not, as I almost did, give up hope. The rains will come. In the meantime, I have harvested the morning dew and dug under the dry riverbeds. I have found water in the desert. Here are the only games from Not-E3 that were actually worth your time.

Carcass Clad

I love clunking machinery and a diegetic interface, and I love steering tanks through desolate landscapes. Carcass Clad is about both, as you and your co-op partners operate the cranks and levers of the Yksiö, your Soviet (or Soviet-inspired) tank which has the husks of (mutated?) livestock messily nailed to its armour. That this is also from Wrong Organ, the

07 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I am hosting a sleepover for three ten-year-olds and so there will be no lie-in for me today. As I write this now, on Saturday, it's not yet even clear whether there will be sleep for me. That doesn't mean we can't heroically gather some fine writing about videogames (and much more), though.

For PC Gamer, Rick Lane tells the story of the making of Unreal 2. I remember that it was initially enormously ambitious, but I did not know (or did not remember) that it effectively wanted to be Mass Effect.

Verdu wanted to create an all-new Unreal experience, one that leant harder into the cinematic sci-fi of the original. "I hatched a vision for a game that, rather than you just being constrained to one world, it would have this story device that allowed you to move between worlds, and that became a spaceship," he explains. "We were going to create a little simulation of a world on a ship, and it would have these characters that move around, that you have these interesting conversations with, and those characters were going to develop along with the story,

31 May 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Links to good words about videogames

Good morning, videogames. I have spent much of my spare time this week spring cleaning, and I'm not done yet. Before we begin another day of scrubbing, lets stay in bed a little longer and enjoy some fine words about games.

For Teen Vogue, Nicole Carpenter asked, why are thin bodies the default in games? It's for the expected reasons, but Carpenter speaks to actors, animators and motion capture experts to explain the challenges and all the ways it's wholly achievable.

Problems arise when there's a big difference in the skeleton of an actor and the body they're being tied to. Drop a short actor's skeleton into a tall character's body and you've got a "spatial problem," Counsell says. "A four-foot tall character takes five steps forward, they've traveled a few meters," he says. "A ten-foot tall character takes four steps forward, they've traveled tens of meters." A short character with an unnaturally long stride, or a tall character with tiny, fast steps, is just not going to look right.

I have yet to start 007: First Light, which means I am yet to read any reviews of

28 May 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

One of the best arcade racers is about to disappear

Coast 2 Toast

I haven't read Brendan Keogh's book The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist, but I believe I can make a water tight counter-argument in my new book proposal, If The Videogame Industry Doesn't Exist, How Come I Hate It So Much?.

From June 1st, Horizon Chase Turbo, its predecessor and all DLC will be delisted from all storefronts, preventing people from buying one of the best arcade racers of the past decade.

We're used to racing games being delisted because they often contain licensed cars and those licenses expire. The Horizon games do not contain any licensed cars, however.

We're also sadly used to racing games becoming unplayable, because they were 'always online' in some nebulous way and their servers are switched off. Horizon Chase Turbo's only online component was leaderboards, however, which were already disabled back in 2023. What's happening now wouldn't fall afoul of the Stop Killing Games movement, because owners will still be able to play the game.

"Couch multiplayer is back." Aaaaand it's gone again.

In short, Horizon Chase Turbo remaining available to purchase via digital storefronts wouldn't cost its developers anything.

The announcement that the

25 May 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Tinkering with games is as good as playing them

Computer is my hobby

Our first home computer was an Amstrad CPC 464. My Dad bought it and used it for, among other things, building a database of all the films he had recorded on VHS tapes. He's a Western buff and he'd spend weekends pecking in details of which tape had which film, and since multiple tapes had multiple films, how far you had to fast forward to find the one you wanted. I didn't understand this at the time, as I was only a few years old. My brothers and I used the Amstrad for playing games - or for trying, anyway, and then for learning patience when the cassette tape failed to load for the third time. Why would you want to spend your time with the computer updating a database when you could be playing games?

Now I know better. Now I know that videogames are just one avenue through which you can tinker with the computer.

In retrospect, my tinkering started early, when I realised that drawing Worms levels in DeluxePaint on the Amiga and then importing the bitmaps in-game was more fun than playing Worms itself. When we got a PC in the mid-90s,

24 May 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Links to games writing from the past week

Good morning, videogames. A heatwave has struck the UK this weekend, a country where all the buildings are designed to retain heat. Unfortunately I must remain indoors, because my skin is designed the same way. Let's take a sweaty, sunburnt look at some writing about videogames from across the week.

Over at Remap Radio, Dia Lacina took on the unenviable task of reviewing ZA/UM's new game, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies.

We learn in the opening minutes of Zero Parades that CASCADE is the only agent to return from a job gone bad, and now she's warehoused in a filing cabinet-gulag for failed spies called "The Freezer." This is where you stew in self-accusatory depression, spending your days drowning under paperwork while you hold trauma's finger and point it right at yourself. This is spy hell.

The scandal-soaked rat kings over at the Jank spiritual predecessor didn't manage a full review of Zero Parades (unlike us), but Edwin Evans-Thirlwell did deign to bring his takes-one-to-know-one expertise to explaining why ZA/UM's latest is "both bootleg Disco Elysium and a spirited interrogation of fake culture in

17 May 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Our weekly roundup of links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. It has been a week of everyone, everywhere writing about Mixtape (including me), which means our links mostly have a theme this time. The theme is: articles I disagree with. Is Mixtape worth a perfect score? Is it cheap pablum? Is it too nostalgic? Is its depiction of the '90s too fast and loose and therefore not nostalgic enough? Is it an Australian psy-op? Are teens unlikeable? Are games journalists unlikeable? We will not answer any of these questions (except maybe the last one, every day forever), but here are just a handful of the articles I disagreed with this week.

Cameron Kunzelman wrote about how and why Mixtape deploys its music, and whether it can be effective in a world of nostalgic Spotify playlists.

What is maybe more notable about Mixtape, and what might bring people to clear defensiveness or derision when they encounter it, is that the kind of sampling it does with the database of culture is about your emotions. Bugs Bunny shows up in Space Jam because he is intellectual property that will draw Looney Tunes fans closer to the product, and he exists in contextless space and time to be summoned