Feature - Jank

23 Jul 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Megastructures.

That's it. That's the headline

Big concrete is taking over. There are now enough megastructures in games to justify a whole bundle on Steam. You may not be familiar with the term "megastructure" if you've not yet been cornered by your architecture-obsessed pal in the pub, or by your manga mate who keeps telling you to read Blame. It is basically an artificial space so huge you can't easily conceptualise it. One enormous planet-covering city encased in a shell. An orbital world many thousands of kilometers in circumference. That awful shopping mall in Edmonton, Alberta.

Big weird places that make you feel like an insignificant pipsqueak, essentially. Megastructures are not new to videogames. The subterranean complex of Portal 2 stretched further than fans of the first game would have guessed, and the cavernous corridors of Halo suggest a galaxy of long-lost giants. But now indie developers are increasingly exploring these colossal spaces. And small developers, it turns out, go pretty big.

"I spent quite a lot of time in my childhood staring out at vast roads from nearby hills full of little travelling dots," says Aleksandra Herout, developer of Metal Garden, a first-person shooter set in a drab land with a titanic concrete ceiling for a sky. "As the place I grew up in is a transport hub for the greater region, there was much of this architecture to be found in local landscapes.

"It wasn't just the size that made them stick with me, but also the sense of anticipation. The promise that this open road would lead me somewhere else. I kept returning to this feeling again and again throughout my life, and it very much impacted the visual language of Metal Garden."

'It is large enough if it makes your head spin and heart pound'

In Herout's 2-3 hour singleplayer shooter, you wander lonely hilltops and lurk through deep blocky catacombs, routinely blasting dark gunfolk and beefy catlads who - it is suggested - have caught wind of a priceless discovery: a way out of the structure. The shotguns and sniper rifles are straightforward, and the jetboot doublejump is as satisfying as equivalent leaps in Destiny 2. But it's the landscape that makes Metal Garden easy to recommend (plus it costs peanuts).

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22 Jul 2026 By Jeremy Peel Feature

The making of Boiling Point: Road To Hell, the most broken game I've ever loved

How ambition turned an open-world pioneer into a janky cult classic

Sometimes, when a dad squints at a monitor to assess their child's latest PC gaming obsession, they say exactly the right thing. Ilya Gulyaev's dad suggested that, if he liked modding Operation Flashpoint so much, he should seek out an apprenticeship.

"He literally told me to pick up a copy of a local PC gaming magazine, find an article about Ukrainian videogames in development, write down the company names, look them up in the phone book, and call them," Gulyaev says. "Back in those days, such a direct approach actually worked."

The year was 2003. Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl was little more than a crackle on a Geiger counter, and Ukraine's development scene was in its nascency. "It was in an absolutely embryonic state," says Oleksandr Khrutskyi, who worked at Boiling Point developer Deep Shadows. "I think there were probably no more than one or two thousand people working in the games industry across the entire country."

The team grappled with open-world problems which hadn't been solved by the wider industry

Ukrainians had only a decade earlier detached themselves from the Soviet Union, but the resulting governmental flux was to the benefit of budding developers. "Weak tax policy and imperfect intellectual property laws opened great opportunities to anyone who understood how to operate a computer," says Oleksandr Honcharuk, who worked on Boiling Point as a 3D artist. "We received untaxed payment in the envelopes. If we wanted to try any software, we rode to the book market and bought any cracked software we wanted. Official versions we bought only for final compiling and exporting. These factors lowered the cost of the development dramatically."

Driving a car in a first-person viewpoint towards a roadblock on a jungle road.

Many entrants to this new field were self-taught enthusiasts, but even they were surprised to see Gulyaev walk into the rented three-room apartment that Deep Shadows called an office with his dad in tow. "Imagine our wonder," says Honcharuk. "Because he was only 15 years old." Nonetheless, Gulyaev proved himself as a 3D modeller, recreating an M167 Vulcan Air Defense System as a test assignment. "It ended up being used in the game because I did it well, receiving only two rounds of feedback for my first-ever real in-game asset," Gulyaev says. "After that, they felt confident giving me more work."

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19 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. What's the point of a lie-in when your bed is on the ground? I am, as this post is published, waking up - if indeed I slept at all - at a campsite, where I have been experiencing all the discomforts of the outdoors with a large contingent of children and animals. For that reason, I'm going to keep things brief this week, and hope that you enjoy your links from a comfier bed than my own.

Videogame studios aren't monoliths, writes Hayes Madsen, responding to an article that tried to draft fantasy developers for Microsoft IP from the burning remnants of last week's layoffs and divestments.

Xbox's franchise-first approach is bad for a number of reasons, but this kind of coverage is endemic of a major problem that has plagued games media for years, even decades - the idea that studios are monoliths. Studios make games, not the hundreds of people that make up a studio. I'm certainly not going to claim I haven't been guilty of the same thing in the past, but we need to do better.

I hadn't even heard of this game, but Lewis Gordon

12 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. Wall Week has ended, bringing to a close what began as a dumb joke and then wandered, article by article, into something surprisingly sincere. I feel that this is very Jank, as much as anything can be said to be "very Jank" when this website has existed for only six months. Thanks to all who signed up to support what we're building here. Now let's find some other good writing from across the rest of the internet.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced released this past week. For PC Gamer, Morgan Park played both it and the original back-to-back to produce a review that digs into the granular differences between them, and the question marks over remaking a game that's not that old and holds up quite well.

Ubisoft spent a generation transforming Assassin's Creed from a stealth-action power fantasy into a loot-driven RPG with spammy combat, and only now is it trying to make amends. Resynced feels like Ubisoft teaching itself how to make a proper Assassin's Creed again, and graded on that curve, it's quite good.

For Unwinnable, Jay Castello looks back at ten years

05 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking

Good morning, videogames. It was a little quiet on Jank this week. Is this acceptable? Not to me, and I think you should be ruder to us in the comments so we don't let it happen again. In the meantime, here are some fine words about videogames (and Jackass) to see you through Sunday morning.

The best cinema-going experience I've had in the last ten years was seeing Jackass Forever, because nothing unites an audience like a funny and painful stunt. I used to look down upon the show, even as I watched it, but some mixture of audience nostalgia and good personal branding by the likes of Steve-O have changed its place within culture in the years since. For Aftermath, Joshua Rivera writes about exactly that, and how it "transformed from idiotic nuisance to one of the most endearing symbols of male friendship in pop culture", culminating in the new and final movie, Jackass: Best And Last.

Writing too much about Jackass is its own kind of stunt; the word count creeps up and so does the likelihood you've embarrassed yourself somehow, like you've shit your pants in word form. It is silly

29 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

I love the command line

Open article.txt

I love typing weird words in the dark. The command line interface is an archaic curiosity to some, or a desperate measure - an obsidian prompt invoked by troubleshooting articles when something on your PC has gone terribly wrong. But for me it's an invitation to an invisible realm of circuitry and verbs. I thank the cybergods that plenty of game developers have a similar fascination.

For example, Duskers 2.0 was announced during the summer games dump, a long overdue sequel where the simple typing of instructions to glitching robots is the only weapon you have against an alien bestiary of unseen threats. The command line, when done well, is enough to hang a whole sci-fi horror universe upon. It's like groping around in a dark room, with language as your only limb.

"The command line allowed us to make Duskers so much more atmospheric," says Tim Keenan, founder of Misfits Attic. "It forced the player to 'speak' to the drones in their language, reinforcing the idea that you are alone and the drones you're talking to are cold tech that require you to conform your speech and thoughts to their way of communicating.

28 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith The Lie-In

The Lie-In

Links worth clicking.

Good morning, videogames. I am a little late with The Lie-In today, such that it is no longer morning as this goes live. This is because I met up with Jonty in fleshworld on Friday night and we filled ourselves with the devil's liquid. The regret on Saturday was overpowering. Now it is Sunday and I am reborn via the medium of links to good videogame writing.

Star Fox released this past week. I am currently resisting the urge to buy it, at least until I've completed a couple of other Switch 2 games that sit in front of it in the queue. For now, I enjoyed Chris Schilling's review for Eurogamer.

Conscious as I am that memory is the most unreliable of narrators, I don't recall feeling quite so exhilarated by some of these stages. Katina's mothership is more imposing than ever, spitting out fighters by the dozen. Sector X's derelict base feels enormous as you pick your way through its ruins. Take the warp route on Meteos and your destination is positively kaleidoscopic, a proper feast for the eyes. It's not too much of a stretch to suggest this is

25 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Don't pre-order games

They never run out of megabytes at the megabyte store

The videogame industry wants you to buy games before they're released because it makes it easier for them to project their future earnings, and because they want your money before you find out whether a game is good or not.

Don't do it. They won't run out of copies, I promise.

Pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto 6 go live today. It's one of the most anticipated entertainment properties ever, in any medium, and I can understand wanting to give in to that excitement, and to participate in some way with what feels like a cultural moment of real significance.

You don't have to do that by giving them $80 today for a videogame you can't play until November 19th.

Book some days off work. Replay the previous games in the series. Watch some video essays about them. Create a zine about Franklin's dog. All of these are methods of participating in the moment that don't cost you $80 for a videogame you can't play yet.

To be clear, my anti-pre-order stance is not related to Grand Theft Auto 6 specifically.

I've seen the pattern play out