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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

Another week in the PC gaming mines and oh, such wonders it has produced. Nic Ruben wrote an ode to parrying in general and its delivery in Onimusha in particular. 

At their best, nailing a string of parries and ripostes feels like performing Swan Lake while winning a rap battle against god. At their worst, they're the design equivalent of blending a bag of spinach into sugary pasta sauce so fussy toddlers don't realise they're eating quicktime event.

Graham spoke to the people who put Spelunky 1 in Spelunky 2 to create a new, still more powerful Spelunky. This is very important to people like us who have spent hundreds of hours in each game.

Spelunky 2's World 1, by comparison, feels designed for the player. "Spelunky 2 essentially did away with level feelings and moved its extended content into dedicated areas you can visit by taking branching paths, which ends up trading variation for player choice," says SNF. One of those choices happens at the end of World 1 after you fight a mini boss. You can decide whether to go left or right to determine what kind of World 2 you get, but

It has been a very long week in videogames, between the hundreds of games and conversations about them at Gamescom, and the single billion-dollar game that Rockstar chose to finally show off in the middle of it. As an independent media outlet we didn’t cover either of those things, though, and that’s partially a matter of free-thinking principle and also because Graham and I were both away for work so Brendy had to hold the fort. He did a grand job though, starting with taxi reports from Hell Let Loose: Vietnam. 

Even for seasoned FPS players, it's easy to look at games like Hell Let Loose: Vietnam and dismiss them as a sweaty Call Of Duty for people who take a deathmatch too seriously. It's even easier to reject it for the social discomfort of having to actually talk to strangers over the internet. But this is something I love about multiplayer war 'em ups - the small, temporary friendships you forge in hellish circumstances, the micropals you make during a big push or a desperate last stand. The medic who follows you everywhere. The squad leader who says "good fuckin job boys!" when

It has been a big week on Jank. By far the main event was Brendy’s extensive explanation of why he doesn’t like auto-battler games, which continues to rack up online commentary from the tiring “let people enjoy things” (he at no point suggested they shouldn’t) to the intriguing “there is a semi-arbitrary distinction between game feel rooted in physical movement and game feel rooted in UX design” (busted). 

My point is not that these games make us lesser players or lesser people. It's just that they're not half as interesting or groundbreaking as their huge sales numbers and endless praise suggest. Just because something is powerfully psychologically compulsive doesn't make it good art. Just because something eats your time, doesn't make it worth your time. 

So much of our life is already made slick with the grease of automation. It is absurd to think of anybody wanting the self-reading book, the self-watching movie. Why would I want the self-playing game? The whole distinction of games as a medium is that they are about doing stuff. The game that leans more and more towards autoplaying threatens to

It's been another week on Jank, and a surprisingly soggy one. Brendy celebrated the particularly alluring appeal of watersports walking simulator Pools: 

Have you ever noticed how nervousness and excitement are the same feeling? I mean bodily, when you stop and examine what's going on in your belly and on your skin and to your breathing. It's all the same response: something is about to happen. Pools makes me feel that way. For this reason, you could chalk the game up as a damp squib - after three hours of anticipation, nothing does happen. But it doesn't matter to me. Just to live in that feeling of butterfly belly and to walk through this soggy maze wondering what's around the next corner is enough. 

 He also commended Sandcastles, a game which offers everything the title promises: 

I have fond memories of battling the tide with sand as a kid, trying to keep a fort from crumbling, piling up new walls like the sea is an invading army, and secretly revelling in the collapsing facades, relishing my losing fight. Is this what Dwarf Fortress is like for Nate? Sandcastle captures that feeling with