Total Playtime Premium Episode

04 Aug 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

The first Witcher book is great, which points to a larger problem

Rivia questions

Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Text Adventure is our videogame book club, in which we read a videogame novelisation and try very hard to like it. Ahead of the imminent arrival of Season 2 of Text Adventure, we’re finishing up our summaries of the first season.

This article series has not matched the broadcast order because I wanted to end here, with Andrzej Sapkoski's The Witcher: The Last Wish: a collection of short stories that is more-or-less (the publishing order is somewhat haphazard) the first time that anybody encountered roving monster slayer Geralt of Rivia. It is by some distance the best book we read, and unfortunately I must assume that is because it was written as standalone prose rather than something that was backed out of a game world.

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30 Jul 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Pitches get money, sometimes

Another writing-advice special

Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, formerly funded by Patreon. Every two weeks we publish a backer-only episode hosted by Alice Bell, Nate Crowley, Jonty and Brendan. You can listen to this and all previous Patreon-exclusive episodes by subscribing to Jank.

This week’s supporter-exclusive episode is a little piece of history, because it was recorded last month only a few hours after Alice had started reading Dungeon Crawler Carl for the first time. It therefore captured the first few moments of burning contempt, like a building collapse caught by a passing dashcam, that would ultimately result in the Dungeon Crawler Carl review.

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17 Jul 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Alien Isolation Sequels

Yet more selfless ideation for the industry's benefit

Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, formerly funded by Patreon. Every two weeks we publish a backer-only episode hosted by Alice Bell, Nate Crowley, Jonty and Brendan. You can listen to this and all previous Patreon-exclusive episodes by subscribing to Jank.

This week is a rare two-header, as Nate and I convened to workshop some future games in the Alien Isolation franchise, as a service to Creative Assembly once they’ve finished the second one. The results are… surprisingly plausible pitch ideas, although I foresee some real hassle getting the rights squared away.

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02 Jul 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Under Review

We are all made of stars

Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, formerly funded by Patreon. Every two weeks we publish a backer-only episode hosted by Alice Bell, Nate Crowley, Jonty and sometimes Brendan although he was still on paternity leave when we recorded this one. You can listen to this and all previous Patreon-exclusive episodes by subscribing to Jank.

This week is a backer-only episode, which in the recording we still describe as for Patreons because we hadn’t agreed the Jank union yet. The subject is the internet’s favourite source of eternal argument: game reviews. How do they happen, how can they be wrong, and what lessons have we learned from them? The answers are, in order: hastily, no, and very few. Join myself, Alice and Nate to work this out at length.

This episode includes some more-than-usually ropey audio from me (sorry, we think we’ve fixed this but we have a few more episodes to get through) Nate’s games journalism origin story, and a massive picture of Brendy (figurative). Plus: a dead man’s Fallout 76 shoes, how long you have to play a game for, and somehow nothing about actual scoring which you’d have thought would have taken up most of the runtime. This is in itself a valuable lesson about not judging something based on its presumed contents, but we also get in some bitching about review embargoes so in many respects this is exactly what you’re expecting.

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21 Jun 2026 By Jon Hicks Podcast

Total Playtime: Holidays of Wrath

Wish you were here, and possibly armed

Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.

This week’s Patreon episode is both late and with slightly tricky audio, for which I sincerely apologise. The latter is a mystery and the former is just a straight up failure of organisation, showing that we’re just too burned out and need a holiday which by lucky hap is the subject of the episode. Another masterful segue there, all part of the Total Playtime Experience. Along with being late. Ahem.