What We're Playing

17 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Play them for me, for I cannot

Nothing makes me feel quite so motivated as a camping trip, and not in a good way. It's like when you get to the end of a long holiday and right before you're due to return to work, you feel this sudden burst of inspiration to do all the things you soon won't be able to. I could have started a running habit or become the sort of person who gets up at 6am and meditates, but alas, I'm going camping this weekend. I could have played all these new videogames, but alas, I'm going camping this weekend.

Here's what you could be playing. Tell us what you are playing in the comments below.

The Mermaid Mask

Sally stands with her hands on her hips. "I keep staring into it like I'm going to see something... but it really does seem to be empty," she says.

The latest game in the Detective Grimoire series, and another standalone mystery to solve. This one is a locked room murder, and unlike its predecessor, every clue is a 3D object you can rotate and explore in search of secrets. It's also fully voiced and wonderfully animated, if the trailers are any indication. I need to make time to play this.

Denshattack!

A train rockets down a city street towards a femme mech.

Jet Set Radio if instead of a skateboard you were flipping and grinding as

10 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

This post is free

Wall Week, our weeklong celebration of putting up our paywall, is nearing its end. As Brendy explained, many posts will remain outside that paywall each week, including weekly regulars like this one, and including your ability to comment on those articles. We made the decision early on to make commenting free because we want Jank to feel like a community; a cool place to hang out and chat, even if you don't have the money to hand over when Brendy tries a shakedown.

So come in, pull up a chair. Tell us what you're going to be playing this weekend.

Moonlight Peaks

"I do very much enjoy getting a sense of what it is like to engage in these odd customs of your kind," says Death, to a vampire.

Ever since I completed Pokémon Pokopia, I've been looking for a new game to give me errands to do. Moonlight Peaks looks like it could be that game, as a supernatural life sim in which you play as a vampire, befriend the local witches and mermaids, and spend your time potion-making and, of course, growing crops and fishing.

Echoes Of Aincrad

Anime heroes brandish a glowing sword and look up and off screen.

It's been a surprise to me that there aren't more isekai videogames, given the genre's ubiquity and popularity in anime. It's especially odd given how many isekai anime are

03 Jul 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Play a game, while they last

The Steam summer sale continues, which means there's still a relative paucity of new game releases. There's nothing inherent in this weekly feature that requires the three games I pick to be new, but still I have rummaged around behind the sofa to pick three relatively recent games that seem worth your time.

As always, tell us what you are playing in the comments below.

A 2D platformer pixel art world. It is dark and has strange mushrooms. "Get away!" is written in the middle of the screen.

Casualties: Unknown demo

This is a demo I've had open in a browser tab since its release back in April. Delve into caves on alien planets in search of lost cargo, and deal with the strange, hostile environments you find. I'm most interested in this because it has "simulated limb and cardiovascular systems" that require you to fight infections and apply bandages to body parts in order to survive injury. I love a granular wounding system.

Some sort of plant guy is using abilities in third-person on a sandy planet against distant purple enemies.

Voidling Bound

A "creature collector", but far from a Pokémonlike. This looks like a third-person Risk Of Rain 'em up, in which you find and hatch alien creatures, cross-breed and evolve them with Spore-style body-part combinations, and then directly control one of your choice in wave-based combat. That combat is

26 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

The Steam Summer sale is underway, which means you may be playing the ancient game of, Do I Really Need To Buy This Now Or Am I Merely Seeking Dopamine. It's a surprisingly popular game considering the answer is always the same. It's dopamine. You already own dozens of games you haven't played, right?

Here are three new games through which you could seek dopamine this weekend.

A bipedal mech in a grey street, viewed in first-person with a gun in the player's hands. — From the developers of Splitgate.

Empulse

You might never get a Titanfall 3, but Empulse looks like a pretty good consolation. It's a 6v6 multiplayer first-person shooter with wall-running, grapple hooks and pilotable mechs. Its unique idea - or at least, the idea it borrowed from a game other than Titanfall - is paint bombs which you can throw down to apply effects to surfaces, creating faster movement, bigger leaps, and stickiness.

The inside of a fridge, where a little sushi guy is washing mold. Some rotten eggs are nearby. — Imagine how much more time I'd have for writing on Jank if this guy lived in my house.

Moldwasher

There are so, so many games about tidying up in the wake of PowerWash Simulator, but Moldwasher is at least visually distinct by being in isometric 2D. Better yet, you take control of a tiny nigiri sushi,

19 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Aside from lots of Next Fest demos

This has been another relatively quiet week for game releases, because what you're supposed to be playing are the demos released as part of Next Fest. I'd personally recommend Blood Dungeon. If you once had a traumatic experience with a coverdisc and now the idea of a demo triggers a panic attack, fret not: I've still pulled out three newly released games you could play instead.

Tell us what you are playing in the comments, whether it's a demo or not.

The Adventures Of Elliot: The Millennium Tales

The demo of Elliot released several weeks ago and its combat and art style won me over, even if its story and characters seemed gratingly anaemic. That seems to be the broad consensus from reviewers now the full adventure/tale is available. This is a Zelda-style action-RPG with real-time combat rendered in Square Enix's 2D-HD style, and seems to promise a good time as long as you're happy to turn your brain (and maybe ears) off.

City Car Driving 2.0

I played a lot of the original City Car Driving and this sequel offers the same straight-faced simulation of traffic

12 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Tell us what you're playing below

After a week of respite, the machinegun of videogame releases has begun firing once more. In fact, it's been joined now by the handgun of demo releases, as June's Steam Next Fest grows nearer. You can expect some writing about our favourites in the days and weeks to come, but for now, here's a handful of full and finished games you could play this weekend.

Tell us what you coulda woulda shoulda been playing in the comments.

A lot of guys with swords run away from a flame-coloured ocean and through a passageway. — Is there 33 here? I'm not counting to find out.

33 Immortals

A co-op hack-and-slasher for 33 players - sort of. In reality, you can play solo or party up with four friends, and then you'll be matchmade with other people in their own parties for large-scale, MMO-style raids, in which you need to coordinate to take down God. Hades seems like an obvious point of comparison to the combat and loop here, but it's also from Thunder Lotus, the makers of Spiritfarer and Jotun.

A woman stands next to a rosebed in front of a thatched cottage, waterfall and trees in the distance. — We may come to regret replacing most of our food crops with roses.

Tales Of Seikyu

Not a part of the Tales Of series of JRPGs, but a

05 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Tell us what you're playing below

We have once again dragged our nets along the sea floor of videogames to trawl for new releases worth bringing back to port, but for once our catch is bordering on paltry. Perhaps the videogames were simply too small to be caught in our nets, or perhaps the industry's videogame farmers thought it unwise to release alongside the marketing bonanza of Summer Game Fest, which continues over the weekend.

In any case, there are still some interesting new games you could play. Tell us what you are playing in the comments.

Characters, that look like the guys from Peak, drive trucks around a warehouse covered in paint or slime. — Now you know what was at the top of that mountain.

Crashout Crew

The latest game from Aggro Crab, fresh from their success as the co-developers of Peak. Crashout Crew has a similar art style and focus on co-op slapstick, but here your and your buddies are fulfilling orders in a warehouse that's really just an escalating series of physics arenas. A little bit Peak, a little bit Overcooked.

A group of ghostly figures in fancy old fashioned clothes sit around a drawing room. — Guests 1-6.

The 7th Guest Remake

I never played The 7th Guest, but it was practically a permanent fixture for about a decade of PC gaming magazines. This remake uses volumetric filming techniques to produce

29 May 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

If you had infinite time and money, obviously

It's one of those weeks where several long-anticipated videogames all release at the same time, and yet still that's just the tip of the iceberg of the interesting games that released this week. Me? I'll probably just be playing that great game that's about to be removed from sale.

You? Tell us what you are playing in the comments.

A red map pin, but dropped for real in a grassy field. — An educational game urging players to think carefully about the impact of dropping map pins upon local communities.

Map Map: A Game About Maps

I love maps, and videogame maps, and I have a lot of fondness for the stripped-back sexy-as-it-sounds orienteering sim Virtual-O. Map Map is similarly about orienting yourself in a world using landmaps, but here you do so to make the map itself, with a much more playful presentation.

A man cuddles a baby, in a children's bedroom, while another kid crawls on their bed and a third is cuddled by a woman. — Brendan, yesterday.

Paralives

I confess, when Paralives was first shown over five years ago, I figured it was a game that would either never come out or would be bad when it did. A wildly ambitious indie Sims? Sure, it already had a cool character creator, but the rest of the game would surely fall down just as every