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Headphones howling, keyboards clanking, nails scraping on the inside of your computer screen. Hello, these are the sounds of a haunted newsletter crawling out of your inbox like that girl with the hair from out the telly. Jonty is missing this week - he vanished in the early hours of the morning, last seen working on an old Mazda in his garage, speaking to an unknown visitor wearing his ribs on the outside. If you are this man, please get in touch. Jonty has utterly disappeared, leaving behind only a spinning hub cap in a pool of... what is that? "Motor oil"? Car blood. It's car blood. 

Like a good final girl, I will collect the scattered notes he left behind and try to reconstruct the newsletter. The notes are frayed at the edges, random glyphs and characters in a script I don't recognise, possibly WingDings. Was he trying to warn us about something? "The videogames," he has scrawled on one sticky note slapped onto the wing mirror of a rusty BMW, "they are good... but also... they are.......... BAD." What could it possibly mean?

On Jank here's what we got up to.

We were visited by

It’s reviews season on Jank, as we issue considered judgement on the abundance of new games. Marsh kicked it off with Gears of War E-day, from the perspective of somebody whose career began when the series did:

What's changed is my personal ability to compartmentalise—or, perhaps, to kid myself that it was ever some wholly separate, harmless fantasy. Across 20 years, social media and the discourse that trails it has mangled together private, public, work, leisure, entertainment and news—of which a good portion is open-mouthed horror—such that it has toxified even the simple pleasure of smashing open a monster's head like a cantaloupe.  Oh, that we lived in a simpler world, where the murder of a subhuman race of unthinking beasts could be so cleanly boxed as fantasy with no troubling intersection with the current moment at all.  

Khee Hoon Chan commended experiencing Lovecraft’s open racism through the eyes of a selection of flightless birds in Penguin Colony:

There’s a surreality to seeing all these through a penguin’s perspective, one who’s mostly immune to the conflict. These scenes are beguiling because their horror is so

It's Saturday, so let us take stock of a week in Jank. Sin Vega reviewed Thousand Hells, an RPG that forces you to build your team based on vibes rather than numerical stats:

Thousand Hells is sometimes annoying. But it's a price paid for those moments in between, where you have no sure solutions, but some options that, when you stop taking them literally, get you imagining. Maybe "Fyarg is poetic" could help them identify patterns in the stonework? What if "stealthy" could work figuratively, convincing a judge with an unexpected argument? Hidden factors can make a poor choice work anyway, but NPCs too are interpreting, and like Six Ages, sometimes reward a counter-intuitive approach. And so occasionally you'll be fleeing from monsters, and swear aloud after drawing "Oromal is a virtuoso", but then hover over it for a moment, and think "Actually... what if..?".

For this week's Living in Sim, Brendy abandoned the quests in Nivalis and became an avuncular unemployed person, which improved the game considerably.

Nivalis may be summarised as Cyberpunk 2077 without the violence. But there is another way to think of it. It is Bernband with an itinerary. For Bernband

It’s been another week of finely crafted words about PC games on Jank. Graham spoke the hard truth that VR still just doesn’t work, most of the time.

John Wick doesn't have these kinds of problems. John Wick has never died because he was unable to access the gun on his belt because his belt was clipped through the floor while he was crouched. Jack Reacher neither. Jack Reacher has never died because his reality phase-shifted to a living room because his head strayed too close to a Ikea Strandmon footstool.

In the Lie-In, he topped his list of links worth clicking with a plea for favourite critics, which prompted some interesting discussion in the comments and on BlueSky.

Who are the videogame reviewers that, to you, have a definable point of view? I don't mean that you like their work, or that you agree with it. I mean, tell me the writers who have a coherently expressed set of aesthetic principles that they apply, resolutely and consistently, in their work?

Marsh Davies reviewed Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, and found it much more surprising than its appearance or predecessors suggested:

It is a

Welcome back to another week of Jank. We are steadily accumulating more freelance contributions thanks to the slowly expanding number of smart and generous people who are supporting the site - this week's new arrival is Joshua Rivera, who railed against playtime metrics.

I read those words and I feel foolish about the practice of counting all these hours, as if I know how many I have to draw from, or that I'm even wise enough to know how best to spend them. If I find that I've racked up 300 hours this year swearing at roguelikes and clicking through RPGs, what am I meant to do with that knowledge?

Nic Reuben marvelled at the detail of Total Warhammer 3, and the stories it implies but does not tell:

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.

Sin's adventures in the archives surfaced Stellar Monarch 2, which hands off the main 4x burdens to your middle management layer:

Its recent-ish

The week is over and it's definitely autumn now, which I don't care for, but there are some good games and good words to comfort us as the evenings draw in. For the latter, we did some important financial journalism to find out who could make the most without spending any money in Wardogs, and I won't say who won on money but Brendy definitely won on depravity:

I crawl forward to a screaming teammate, lying in the grass ahead of me, and take his machine gun, helmet, and armour. I turn to crawl away, and then think better of it. I turn to revive him. Because it will earn me money. Unfortunately, two other people have had the same idea. We all crowd around our fallen comrade, rubbing our hands together like three fuckbois warming their hands over a Tinder profile.

Sin reviewed Ostranaughts, which is entirely our sort of game (derogatory):

You also get lowercase jank. Lots of it. "Bordering on a professional dilemma" kind of jank. There is so much going wrong with this game that I'm unsure if this will be a recommendation or an SOS.

We passed 900 wonderful, attractive, charismatic

Another week has passed and we managed to fit two reviews into it, because that's the sort of thing you can do when you are powered by reader support rather than advertising. Brendy pondered the single innovative thing and the hundreds of non-innovative things in Sprawl Zero.

This isn't to say I had a bad time. I enjoy throwing chunks of concrete and rebar at the legs of my enemies. That's a good weekend. But I was never truly surprised. That's why I'm not worried about spoiling the plot for you, because if you've played any other shooter in the last 20 years, it basically spoils itself.

Meanwhile Nic judged Blood of the Dawnwalker, a good game that is nevertheless aiming higher than it can reach.

You could argue that just having the option to abstain from drinking humans and gorge on rats allows you to roleplay in ways that reflect your own morality, but I'd say that pales to how thematically incoherent and jarring it feels for Coen's vampirism - which he frequently laments to the point of tears - to mean functionally nothing to the player besides a happy power boost