What We're Playing - Jank (Page 3)

17 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

I've got family visiting, which means I likely won't spend much or any time gaming this weekend. You might be lonesome, however, and what better salve for familial loneliness than a Dad game, of which we've got three flavours this week: a '90s throwback management sim; a blockbuster about showing a surrogate daughter the wonders of the world; and a game about golf.

Tell us what you are playing in the comments, Dad game or otherwise.

Some folks with torches in a medieval town hold leaflets and look confused. — I hope Sintopia is funny, but it might just be sarcastic. Like yer da.

Sintopia

This looks to be inspired by the Bullfrog greats of old, in that it places you in charge of Hell Incorporated. You construct the underworld to turn a profit by punishing souls, while simultaneously using God game-style powers in a pastoral overworld to keep your machinery fed with new sinful denizens. This also means its cheeky sense of humour might cause me to groan myself into the afterlife, but I appreciate that it's not just another 1:1 Dungeon Keeper successor.

A robot gets blasted with electricity as the player, young girl on his back, watches. — No horror but plenty of conflict in Capcom's latest. Like yer da.

Pragmata

Capcom's latest third-person action thingy, and therefore

10 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

Maybe you shouldn't play anything this weekend. Maybe you should step away from your computer, stretch your body, and grab some vitamin D before the sun disappears. Maybe your aches and pains would diminish and your spirits would rise.

Not me, though. I'll be hunched over my computer like a goblin as always. If you're similarly cursed, read on - and let us know what you're playing in the comments below.

Some ramen soup is ladeled into a bowl of noodles on a food prep surface next to other food items. — This is basically identical to Jonty's mechanic sims but with soup instead of bolts.

KuloNiku: Bowl Up!

My kid used to play the Toca Boca games on iPad - which means, of course, that I'd play them, too. The best of the bunch was Toca Sushi Kitchen, which had you chopping items in a seaside restaurant to produce California rolls, et al. KuloNiku seems to be in the same vein: soothing, simple, tactile actions to prepare food for cartoon customers, with perhaps a bit more story owing to its presumably older target audience.

A tower of girders and makeshift platforms collapses into the ocean against blue skies. — This seems like the most fun part.

All Will Fall

What if Frostpunk but also Jenga? All Will Fall is about constructing a city at sea and making the kinds of political

03 Apr 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

This isn't just a weekend, it's a Mega Weekend. That means many of us around the world have both today and Monday off work, and need games worthy of filling such a bountiful gift of free time.

I've got three suggestions for what you could play, but share your own intentions in the comments below.

Two women talk to each other. One, named Alo, says, "It's hard but also... brings back memories." — I'm sure this is all as peaceful as it appears and nothing bad will happen.

Fishbowl

"Fishbowl is a narrative game about dreams, grief, and hope," reads its Steam description, but you can probably tell that much from the screenshot above. This sits somewhere on the spectrum between To The Moon, Undertale, Yumi Nikki and Omori, with cheerful pixel art paired with inky dark voids. I feel like real life as enough inky dark voids as it is, but I know many who eat these games up.

A watery shockwave circles outwards from the player, hitting monsters that surround him, in a land of pink seas and green fields. — There's colour and spectacle in this Survivors-like that makes me want to play it.

Temtem: Swarm

For about three weeks in 2022, creature collecting and battling in Temtem was the hottest game in town, as finally the PC had something to offer those with a Pokémon itch. The excitement didn't last,

27 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

The half-term holidays have arrived, which in my neck of the woods means all the kids are off school for the next two weeks. This is going to do wonders for my progress in Pokémon Pokopia, and serious damage to my progress in manshooter Marathon. I'm OK with this.

Here's three games you could be playing this weekend, although tell us what is providing you with sweet relief in the comments below.

Water flows through stone aqueducts in a green pastoral hillside. — Beavers and Romans differ mostly by their chosen materials.

Nova Roma

Last week, both Going Medieval and Timberborn left Early Access, but here's another citybuilder entering it - and another which offers new ways to drown your population. Nova Roma is about constructing, well, Rome, and doing so in a manner that please the Gods as well as your citizens. Expect aqueducts and lots of games journalists using "wasn't built in a day" straplines.

A TV/VCR combo displaying the league table on teletext. Derby have 12 points. — I'd like to force an American to play this.

Nutmeg!

I collected football stickers in the '90s, spent pocket money on issues of Match and Shoot, read sports scores on Ceefax and played Subutteo in my mate's loft. Nutmeg! might be a game for me, specifically. It's

20 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

The sun is shining in Brighton, which means my appetite for going outside has returned and my appetite for playing games has greatly dimmed. Luckily I have no available friends nearby this weekend, and so I shall be inside playing videogames anyway.

What of you, our attractive and popular readers? Tell us if and what you're playing in the comments below.

Beavers on ziplines, some of which are robots, float over farms full of lush crops. — I hope these beavers have union protections.

Timberborn

Initially launched in Early Access in 2021, this colony sim features sandbox building and water physics, allowing you to construct vast, hydroelectrically-powered cities of lumber with your populace of beavers. This week brought a 1.0 update, which changes the art and tutorial, adds tools to automate the operation of your city, and smooths the creation of mods. Top stuff.

Some peasants cross a bridge to enter through a stone gate and into a city surrounded by trees and a wooden fence. — Pencils were so big in medieval times.

Going Medieval

Initially launched in Early Access in 2021, this colony sim features sandbox building and deep citizenry management, allowing you to construct vast cities of stone with your populace of needy settlers. This week brought a 1.0 update, which changes the tutorial, adds new endgame objectives among other content, and smooths the management of your many workers. Top stuff.

Lots of baseball player headshots littered in formation across a baseball field. — Pure

13 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Give me your comments, I need them to live

This week felt like a merciful relief when compared to the machinegun of new releases at the beginning of March. Still, perhaps your hunger is not yet sated. Perhaps you wish for more new games, games about mending teapots, making spells, and murdering monsters.

What a coincidence, here are some games that meet those specific criteria. Let us know what you are playing in the comments down below.

How about a cosy back-to-basic life sim but it's about moving away from streaming services in favour of neatly maintaining the tags on your locally stored mp3 collection?

Piece By Piece

Repair items for animal folk by jigsawing them back together, then use the money you make to decorate your shop. There's some obvious Animal Crossing inspiration here (the fonts, the UI, the character designs), but gardening and painting aside, it seems much more focused on the soothing loop of shop management.

What a magnificent beast. Let's kill it.

Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection

I've never managed to get into a Monster Hunter game, but the Stories spin-off series seems like my most likely route in at this point. Twisted Reflection looks like it

06 Mar 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

WYSPTW or wapwapwapwap for short

Videogames are intensifying! The first week of March has delivered more games I want to play than any other so far this year, and I haven't finished with all the Next Fest demos I want to play yet. Please, please slow down, we are but three sickly men with a small blog.

Here are just some of the games you should be playing this weekend, but remember to tell us all the other games you are playing in the comments below.

A crowded pier dense with shops, a bar, a ship, and dozens of people, rendered in a colourful orthographic style. — Oh, it's a fucking wonderland, is it? Delightful as shit, are we?

Lost And Found Co.

I played the demo of Lost And Found Co. several years ago and had checked in on it intermittently since. Its release this week was still a total surprise. This is a Where's Wally-style hidden object adventure that excites me, mainly, for the warmth and detail of its art style. Sooner or later I'll be queuing up some podcasts and spending hours finding miscellany in its Hergécore dioramas.

Two adventurers stand by a chest. "Not a mimic", reads a sign above it. — This isn't by one of the original Disco Elysium developers, mercifully.

Esoteric Ebb

What if you took many of the RPG systems and writerly flourishes of Disco Elysium and

27 Feb 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments

Last week I suggested that you might play the new Styx game, Blades Of Greed. This week, Styx publisher Nacon declared bankruptcy. I guess you didn't listen to me and now you see what happens. Let's try it again.

Here's three games you could be playing this weekend. Let us know what game you're playing instead in the comments.

Harry Kim is asking for your orders, Captain, in a text prompt next to a picture of the USS Voyager. But look, it's not actually Harry Kim. Harry Kim was sucked into space and killed in season two and we replaced him with a different Harry from an alternate universe. Nobody talks about it but our Harry Kim is dead! Don't let Janeway cover up anymore dea-- — I can't explain right now, but that's not the real Harry Kim.

Star Trek: Voyager - Across The Unknown

This survival strategy game is supposedly a "faithful recreation" of the TV series, a very dumb show that I love very much. Presumably this means that the characters aboard the ship die constantly but then are miraculously restored within 44 minutes, their traumatic experiences never to be mentioned again. In fact, I'd be much more inclined to play it if it was more knockabout toybox than Frostpunk misery sim. Here's hoping.

Some magic guys blast fire at an enemy next to a bunch of cornfields and grass. — The use of fire in these fields is deeply irresponsible.

Towerborne

Stoic, makers of The Banner Saga trilogy, return with a new game with similarly gorgeous character designs. There's no turn-based thinkery here, however. This is a co-op action-RPG about