Feature - Jank

25 Oct 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

11 Steam Next Fest demos I gently recommend

They're free and finding your own ought to be the whole point... But you could start here

Steam Next Fest runs until October 26th, and the many demos therein often remain available long after the fest has ended. That means you've got time, but not enough time, to try everything that looks interesting therein. To help you, I've spent the past week playing demos myself, and I've picked 11 that I think could be worth your time.

Should you take this to mean that this is everything the Next Fest has to offer, and all else is trash? No, of course not. I think it's worthwhile for me to highlight some demos I liked - and to acknowledge their warts where I see them - but really the joy of an event like this is the opportunity to go crate digging for yourself in search of the demos that appeal to you. Yes, if you step beyond Steam's personalised recommendation algorithm, you will encounter games that you do not care for, and even despise. Do not be afraid. This is how you strengthen your muscles of personal taste and discover the gems that speak to you but which cannot be predicted by an algorithm. And if you've already done that, share what you found in the comments below, so we can all cheat off your homework.

Feather's Edge

A fox darts through the air, cutting through one of a number of grey centipede-like enemies. — Technically these guys live here and you just showed up and started murdering them.

This is an action platformer built around a single, fun mechanic: your jump can be aimed and charged to fling you across great distances, and to slice through any enemy that's in your path. I am never not happy if a game lets me cling to ceilings, or encourages me to corral a swarm of pursuing monsters so I can line up a single devastating attack. Everything around that one good-feeling move is a lot more rough at this stage. There's lots of handsome art and pleasant music, but menus, upgrades, and level progression feel unfinished. Because they are. Still, there's plenty here to enjoy, and enough that I'll be keeping an eye on Feather's Edge whenever it gets a full release.

Shifu: Traffic Masters

A small, red, flatbed truck takes a corner and spills watermelons all over the road. A police car is in pursuit. — This picture perfectly encapsulates the entire game.

There are a bunch of physicsy delivery sims around now, in which you pack objects into the back of a flatbed truck and then watch them slide and spill as you speed (or carefully trundle) around corners. Whether a new one is worth playing is, I think, based on the vehicle handling and the setting, and Shifu: Traffic Masters succeeds in both. You're making your deliveries (sometimes cargo, sometimes post, sometimes people) around the fictional streets of 1990s China with a VHS aesthetic, police chases, and functional, reasonably priced cars that wobble on their suspension in a way that begs you to whip them down an alleyway like you're playing the original Driver. Do I wish some of the cars were less shit? Yes, especially the police car, which takes an eon to accelerate and rather strips the game of fun when you're trying to box-in a fleeing target.

Mr. Records

Giant hands click their fingers and a small old man walks on a cloud in technicolour. — I, too, wear only pants in real life but a bowtie in my dreams.

By day, you run a record shop, choosing the correct vinyl album to hand to customers based upon clues about their taste. At night, you listen to the new records you've purchased for the store, each one of which becomes its own rhythm-based side-scrolling level for you to jump, slide and kick across. As rhythm games go, it's pretty forgiving, at least in this demo, and doesn't require the precise timing of a Rhythm Heaven or the deft platforming of a Geometry Dash. That's a good thing, because I'm terrible at those games. Here I got to enjoy the animation and the colour palette and the old man in his pants. There's a track editor, too, if you fancy importing your own music and building your own courses.

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14 Oct 2026 By Nic Reuben Feature

What's On Your Bookshelf?: Space Marine 2's Ashley Cooper

"The pitch for the first book is 'lesbian necromancers in space' and it delivers on every word in that sentence"

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to What's On Your Bookshelf?, Jank's twice monthly chat with a selection of beer-battered, triple-cooked game-makers about books.

I saw another take today about "breaking out of your reading comfort zone". It's one I see quite frequently and am broadly supportive of, though only for a certain type of person. Generally speaking, the worst possible advice you can give someone who isn't reading as much as they'd like is "have you tried reading shit you're not excited about?".

I'm increasingly of the opinion that every piece of reading or writing advice on the correct way to do something outside of the purely actionable (you will probably need a keyboard if you want to make words happen on a computer, etc) contributes to a growing state of paralysis over doing that thing the right way. A plea, then, to reject the tyranny of correctness and simply enjoy some words. Oh, hey! We've wrangled another word enjoyer. It's Solace State, Motive's Iron Man, and Space Marine 2's Ashley Cooper! Cheers Ashley - mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

What are you currently reading?

I haven't been reading as much recently as I normally like to, but I've been working on fixing that. I finally started reading Harrow the Ninth while I was on vacation a couple weeks ago. It's the second book in Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series. The pitch for the first book, Gideon the Ninth, is "lesbian necromancers in space" and it delivers on every word in that sentence. Gideon is one of my favourite books in recent memory, and so far Harrow feels different in an interesting way and I'm excited to see where it goes.

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08 Oct 2026 By Nic Reuben The Cooldown

How are Cyber Knight's slick and silly heists 103 updates later?

Spoiler: they're still very good!

Pour one out, chumbos, for toothless soothsayer cyberpunk, rendered gummy and ineffectual upon the deflating crystallisation of our own dark future-present's tropes, which are mostly boring and stupid. Gen AI primarily exists because today's oligarchs were sad no-one wanted to paint their portraits. All the street drugs either make me anxious or sleepy and no-one is even trying to make the cool lickable feathers from Vurt.

The robots might gain sentience, but it won't make them happy, since the robots are just here to solve the conundrum of wealthy sociopaths still needing someone to clean the toilets in their apocalypse bunkers. The cyberdecks are neat but mainly useful for avoiding forced Adobe updates. No-one gets a Gundam. Everyone gets the lettuce shits. The sky above the port is the colour of a viral raccoon's butt.

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The Cooldown is Nic's twice monthly column about shaking strategy games and seeing what stories fall out.

Prescience be damned - stealth tactics gem Cyber Knights: Flashpoint wallows in post-relevance cyber-kitsch with magnetic, married-to-the-bit abandon. Your cool criminal mates don't call you 'friend' but 'chumbo'. A computer's intrusion countermeasures are shortened to 'IC', so hackers 'Skate IC'. People insult each other with "B-tier citizen". Built atop pulverised pastiche as it is, I don't mean to suggest the worldbuilding is in any sense thin - there's a chunky codex of corpo names and cybernouns. But it is just predictable enough to be comforting, just clever enough to be in conversation with its own tropes without that conversation evolving much past "hey, chumbo. Cool jacket".

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01 Oct 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Knytt remains a classic

And Brendy is a rockist snob

TVTropes is a malicious force in storytelling, but it occasionally puts a name to something it's useful to name. I like "Flanderization", which is a fun word to say, and the process by which a character, often in a sitcom, becomes a parody of themselves. Named after The Simpsons' Ned Flanders, who warps across seasons from a relatively normal, albeit improbably perfect figure of envy for slothful oaf Homer, into an absurd Christian fundamentalist whose niceness is a pathological disorder.

I find this word useful because I think the same process happens to videogames. Brendy's "self-playing games" can be understood as being at the extreme end of the process: parodies of the entire medium of videogames, mimicking the structure of upgrades and progress in order to deliver dopamine without the fullness of complexity of their original genres.

But Knytt, originally released in 2006, represents an earlier stage of much the same process. Knytt is Flanderized Mario.

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30 Sep 2026 By Nic Reuben What's On Your Bookshelf?

What's On Your Bookshelf?: Norco's Yuts

"There's a scene of the shambolic protagonist getting destroyed in a game of tennis that converted me."

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to What's On Your Bookshelf? - Jank's bi-weekly chat with a mint-condition, laminated collection of rapidly appreciating game-makers about books.

Every so often, the paper books vs e-readers discourse will spontaneously reheat itself like a malfunctioning MRE. A thorny topic, surely, but consider that if a stray teardrop of sriracha falls on a Kindle page of Zola's Nana, it will then appear on every subsequent page until you wipe it off, creating the effect of an infinite, transient sauce globule echoing through spacetime. Conversely, a hardback copy of Puzo's The Godfather you dribbled marinara on will permanently be your sauce-stained copy of The Godfather, though only on a single, lonely page.

I'd like to think this tells us something important about the nature of something else important, although what exactly, I could not say. Perhaps this week's guest might know? It's only Yuts from Norco and Silenus developers Geography Of Robots! Cheers Yuts - mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

What are you currently reading?

I'm about a quarter of the way into Money by Martin Amis. I read Amis’s collection of book reviews years ago, and have intended to check out his fiction ever since. There's a scene of the shambolic protagonist getting destroyed in a game of tennis that converted me.

The other book on my desk is for research related to our new game, which takes place along Louisiana's coast. Last Days of Last Island by Bill Dixon, about the 1856 hurricane that wiped out a seasonal resort town down here. Dixon does a great job constructing his research into a continuous narrative.

What did you last read?

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28 Sep 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Virtual reality isn't a hardware problem

The tech is better than it's ever been, but VR game design hasn't progressed

When was the last time you heard about a new VR game? If you've seen anyone mention virtual reality in the past few years, aside from the occasional headset review, it's likely been a eulogy for the medium. Strapping screens to your face was always destined to attain the relative popularity of a force feedback steering wheel or HOTAC flight stick, as far as I'm concerned. And so it has.

The challenge is that so many of the obstacles to wider adoption have nothing to do with the quality of the tech. Gunman Contracts might be the perfect illustration of that.

Released into Early Access earlier this month, Gunman promises to turn its players into a John Wick equivalent; a balletic assassin who shoots bad guys with a gun in one hand and catches their dropped weapon mid-air with the other. The reality is more Mr. Bean.

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24 Sep 2026 By Nic Reuben The Cooldown

You don't know what you got (the moon) until it's gone (blown up by a magic rat)

Total Warhammer 3's gorgeous map is going through hell

Somewhere in Nordland's forests, atop a rocky outcrop shaped like a crude arrowhead, a grey wolf howls at the sky. Countless hours in Total Warhammer 3, and it's my first time seeing her. I like to think she's saying goodbye to the moon.

She borks in lunatic prestalgia among dozens of bespoke dioramic sites dotted around the Empire of Man's territories. A mill here. A sports arena there. Cartographic peans to the industry and culture of the thousands of conscripts I'll gift dented cuirasses and spears over the length of my campaign, before marching them off to melt under gouts of sour-green warpfire loosed by cackling rats. In Nordland's port settlements - Dietershafen, Salzenmund - I picture dockworkers hauling and cursing, forced to pull double shifts after half the crew were ground to imitation crab meat by mammoth-riding raiders. Click the ports, and four building chains bear the heroic task of abstracting every non-military facet of the Empire's culture - farms, taverns, tailors, roads.

I don't bring these up to call the simulation gaunt. It's precisely the breadth and richness of Total Warhammer's adaption that invites me to dream of more, I think. The maddening brilliance of grand designs is how they plant seeds for endless grander fantasies. Why shouldn't a game world with this much on offer also contain everything, actually? Why can't I zoom in an extra layer - visit the taverns, hang with the soldiers I'm recruiting? Where are the complex strings of branching story events that let me hunt Skaven in Altdorf's sewers? Lazy devs, please fix (my washing machine, my brain, my life).

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The Cooldown is Nic's twice monthly column about shaking strategy games and seeing what stories fall out.

Instead, I'm thinking about the wolf and the granaries and the docks because it's taken me facing the end of the world - courtesy of three new apocalyptic end-game scenarios that devastate the planet's surface - to finally stop and smell the roses.

Not for Blood Bowl, apparently! That's its own universe.

This is Warhammer, of course, where even the roses reek. Just outside my capital city of Middenheim, there's a patch of swampland I've never noticed before. It's so small that it's difficult to move an army any amount and still remain inside of it. In the rare circumstance that Middenheim is ever under siege by two armies at once from this one specific angle, the attrition from the swamp might be enough to slightly weaken the reinforcing force in the one or two turns it takes to build battering rams. It is, in other words, meaningless. Unless…

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23 Sep 2026 By Sin Vega Feature

Emperors work a gruelling 12-minute day in Stellar Monarch 2

Return of the macro

The trouble I usually have with 4Xeses is the fiddling. Shuffling units around, optimising the workers, replacing outmoded armies, making sure everything is building something useful. It's why a war kicking off is usually the point at which I give up.

The main ways to prevent this are delegation, and restricting the player's capacity to intervene. Stellar Monarch 2 combines both in a curious arrangement of massive scale and limited scope. It is a monarch simulator, after a fashion, wherein you're responsible for specific duties, but the rest are someone else's job. The empire won't grind to a halt without you, but it absolutely will not act on those things that require your instruction, like which planets to claim or what to research. Conquering and building three planets is a matter of clicking a few times to authorise it, then waiting. Fleets are regularly built and retired, applying research bonuses, and optionally redesigned in composition. The most complex bit of the game, but rarely needed.

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You're reading Sin's column about the games of yesteryear. Not old enough to be retro, not shiny enough to be new. This is the hinterland of PC gaming. And the first of our subscriber goals!

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