Newsletter

It’s Valentine’s Day, so let us slip into something more comfortable - like a look back at this week’s headlines.

At Jank Towers, Graham wished that games culture was more like book culture, although discovered in the process that the photography is harder than you think. I played Quarantine Zone: The Last Post and found it to be a deadening amount of busywork, and Car Service Together which was a more satisfying amount of busywork until I found out what Brendy was doing. Our members-only Discord now has a #jontys-garage channel and I wish to make clear that I had no hand in its creation.

Brendy also went back to the newly-denumbered Overwatch to see if it had indeed been reborn, and exclusively revealed that it’s still Overwatch. Finally, a games media outlet brave enough to say “it’s good, if you like that sort of thing”. He also rejoiced in the return of Samurai Gunn 2 and joined Nate and myself on Total Playtime to pick some game characters to be our life coaches.

Elsewhere in the gaming world, Discord said that it wasn’t going to force everybody to verify their age to use

It’s Saturday, which means it’s time to review the week in PC gaming. Chez Jank, Brendy completed his mountain-climbing adventure by being eaten by the developer of Cairn, before killing all his squad members in Menace, reviewing TR-49 and proposing some additional Types of Quest. Graham found the perfect Speed Racer game but can’t play it, and a perfect PICO-8 that he can’t stop playing. The minds at Total Playtime decreed that the Splinter Cell novel and Split Fiction are both bad. 

Beyond these walls, we learned that there's a Baldur's Gate 3 TV show in the works, although Larian are not involved which is another little data point on why they're sticking with their own IP for their next game. It's being made by Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin, which I prefer to think of as Chernobyl showrunner Craig Mazin because that was much better television. 

Welcome to Jank Mail, our weekly newsletter, summarising the last week in PC gaming and our own contributions to it. Henceforth it will arrive on Saturday, but I was running late this weekend. The thing about being called Jank is that any such haphazardness can be attributed to brand marketing, so it’s on purpose actually. 

The most significant event in PC gaming last week was, of course, the launch of Jank: a new reader-funded website about PC games which strives to publish things that other outlets are too commercially sensible not to. Graham wrote our introductory manifesto, and Brendy explained and then embodied it by making three game developers climb a mountain, asking some others about working at Telltale, and explaining why AI can’t do game criticism. 

We all nominated our best games of the decade so far, and debuted our regular guides to what you should play and read this weekend. We recommended Sektori and reviewed Sword of the Sea and Big Hops, and debuted our partnership with the Total Playtime podcast by making Graham read the Death Stranding novelisation, which captured the most wearing parts of the game and none of the highlights but