Feature - Jank

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

11 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Is Overwatch actually worth playing again?

Someone's been huffing the hype balloons

Last week a blitz of articles asserted that live servicey shooter Overwatch 2 was making a comeback, a conclusion that presumes the hero blaster had ever "gone" anywhere in the first place. PC Gamer called it a long-in-the-works "glow-up", a fairer assessment than Kotaku's grandiose statement: "While you weren't looking, Overwatch put its crown back on". Neither article examined the hero shooter and how it plays today from the position of a long-lost player, instead providing a summary of changes and dramas over the years. The recent influx of press has more to do with a PR push developers Blizzard have been making to bring attention to an (admittedly large) update that adds five new heroes in one day. The silliest part of this update is the decision to rebrand Overwatch 2 to simply Overwatch, a walking back of the sequel's grand intentions so clownish that it resulted in some more fun headlines.

So, the natural question arises: is Overwatch actually good again? Was it ever even "bad"? Maybe if someone - I dunno - replayed it and wrote about it, we can find out. So let's do that.

For context, I loved Overwatch but stopped playing in 2018

04 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Peak

Three game devs climbed a mountain - epilogue

We've Peaked

So all of my interview subjects died. Big deal. We learned some things along the way, didn't we? Back in Peak's lobby (a cartoonish airport you can play around in) the developers and I have a debrief. Is there anything they've learned while playing Peak - apart from the fact that having friends is fun?

"Don't work on a game for five years," says Bennett, referencing the fact that Peak was reportedly made in just a few months, yet has sold a huge number of copies.

"Yeah," says Holly, "that's a big one, honestly... it shows how you don't need to spend a huge amount of time if you just go in with a really simple premise and kind of extrapolate your idea from there."

"Yeah, do a little less," laughs Bennett.

For a full list of articles in this series - click here

What do they think of the game itself? What's interested them most about it?

"I think it's really interesting, especially in multiplayer, if I look at the 40 minutes we've played, we've obviously climbed, but also I've been fed,