What is your fondest memory of jank? 14 game devs tell us
A celebration of unintentional comedy in games
Jank, the website, is one month old. That's old enough to cry for attention. Which is what we've done. We gave this PC games blog its name out of fondness for broken but ambitious games. Jank is often the byproduct of game designers trying to bulldoze their way through realistic expectations. There are borked games and then there are borked games that exude raw zeal through ragdolling corpses or flying animals. When a game reaches for the sky, it sometimes turns the skybox inside out.
We aren't the only ones with fond memories of jank in videogames. To celebrate our scrappy website's continued existence, we emailed a bunch of game developers and asked them a simple question: "What is your favourite memory of jank in a game?" Here's what they said.
Brendon Chung, Blendo Games
(Lead designer of Skin Deep, Quadrilateral Cowboy)
"During my playthrough of Fallout 4, the fast travel system stopped working. This meant my only mode of traversal was: walking. To get anywhere, I had to hoof it. And it was great?
"I became crazy stingy about how much stuff I was lugging around. Embarking
The Lie-In
Our weekly roundup of links worth reading.
Good morning, videogames. As you read this, I pray that I am having an actual lie-in. I must recuperate after spending all of Saturday tired and wounded, after having spent all of Friday evening fighting off the brigand Edwin from aging ad-funded webzone RPS. After several hours of struggle, he fled back into the underbrush, his devious mission unfulfilled, and his current whereabouts are unknown. I suspect we shall see him and his rotten ilk again. For now, at least, I retain the strength necessary to share some articles, videos and podcasts worth consuming from across the past week.
Sony closed down Bluepoint Games, the studio best known for remaking Demon's Souls, without them having released a new game under Sony's ownership. Nathan Brown tackled this with customary scorn in his Hit Points newsletter this week.
With new blockbusters taking longer and costing more than ever to make, and nostalgia never a more powerful currency, shuttering a proven specialist in remakes and remasters is frankly insane. Casting out a team of such deep technical expertise and, more crucially, such broad institutional knowledge — Bluepoint doesn’t just know its own tools and technology, but also those of the studios whose games
Jank Mail: Phil out, VR and sequels
Plus: Molyneux is doing it again
Welcome to Jank Mail, our rundown of the week in PC gaming and Jank in particular. I like to start with the latter because we are of course the true arbiters of what matters, but today I have no choice but to start with IGN’s reveal that Big Phil is out at Xbox, along with his presumed successor Sarah Bond, prompting a lot of late-night discourse and Microsoft rushing out the PR plan that was supposed to kick in next week.
I’m a bit down about it: Xbox has been a state of perpetual struggle in the last decade and lots of people have well-developed reasons to hate Spencer's guts, but in my encounters he was always a nice guy who consumed and cared about the products his business made. This made him a very rare breed in the executive class, who routinely regard both their output and their audience as budget line items. His replacement is a jar-grown exec who previously headed Microsoft’s AI output so the discourse outlook isn’t wonderful, although she said games are art in her intro message so at least that’s one argument we can stop having.
What else
Vholume demands to be played with your entire body
First-person parkour on the concrete's edge.
After an hour in Vholume, my neck aches and my legs are shaking. It's because I've been tensed like a coiled spring for the duration, racing in a first-person parkour time trial where a single mistake might cause me to fall to my death or worse, fail to break my personal best.
"First-person parkour" might bring to mind Mirror's Edge, and sure enough Vholume has the wall-running and bum-slides to go split-toe to split-toe with that cult classic. But Vholume is the work of Léonard Lemaitre (among others), one of the brothers responsible for Jank favourites Babbdi and Straftat. There's no gleaming city of glass here, only the by-now trademark brutalist architecture and water-damaged concrete that makes you feel like you're racing through an empty server of some forgotten Half-Life mod.
Vholume's current free beta contains just two tracks, and it's the basic hub world that has obsessed me for most of the past week. It's a simple circuit under grey skies, with an abyssal drop which threatens to swallow you from below. You will race around it a few times and pretty quickly achieve a time quick enough to grant you a bronze medal, at which point you will
What you should play this weekend
Tell us what you are playing in the comments
I took the Steam Deck with me when travelling last weekend, and instead of leaving it in my suitcase untouched in favour of reading books, as per usual, I spent much of my downtime playing tactical deckbuilder StarVaders. This is because I know I need to write posts for Jank and therefore must be playing games in every spare moment. Cheerfully, it's also because I think you'd appreciate the articles even if they're about games outside the current release cycle. This is highly motivating, so thanks.
On the other hand, you're making me less literate. Read on for some games you could be playing in lieu of reading books this weekend - and tell us what you are playing in the comments.
Under The Island
I'm never too excited by the sight of another 2D Zelda-like, because the formula is simple enough that it often struggles to shine at lower levels of execution. Under The Island is threatening to overcome my skepticism with its trailers, which show an impressively diverse world and an emphasis upon the puzzle part of the formula over the combat.
The best Zachlike is getting a big surprise expansion
And it's half as long as the original
Nine years after stoically engineering one of the finest puzzle games known to humanity, the creators of Opus Magnum have decided to release a chunky prequel expansion that is "around half the length of the original". God, I needed this. For anyone who fondly remembers posting GIF after GIF of their clicky-clacky solutions in the original alchemical braintickler, it is good news. Good enough to break our usual cynical binning of press releases here at Jank, and relay some of the details.
It's called Opus Magnum: De Re Metallica, and let me pause here to say it is a terrible idea to tempt fate by invoking the name of a famously litigious rock band, but never mind. We'll soon have more clonky puzzles with swivelly mechano arms.
It's going to have it's own prequel story, about a "maverick alchemical researcher" who is inventing reckless stuff which'll see him "clash with established orthodoxy, bicker with his assistant, and attract attention from the Great Houses." I enjoy the stories of these games but I imagine a lot of folks only care about cold hard facts. So know that there are three new "glyphs". Three fresh chapters of puzzles. And a difficulty level
Creature Kitchen is a fireside menace about making bigfoot breakfast
The way to a monster's heart is through its stomach(s)
Failbetter Games have described their upcoming eldritch-garden-'em-up Mandrake as having 'fireside menace'. This is a description I find pleasing, and I'm keen to blow oxygen on the flame of that term before something I find nauseating like "fluffy spookems" or "nightlight-slop" catches instead. This is most especially in light (that of a flickering, unreliable torch) of playing Creature Kitchen. It's a new-ish game where I threw PB&J sandwiches at a raccoon with the calculating expression of Jane Goodall observing a favourite gorilla.
In Creature Kitchen you materialise outside a small log cabin and use subtle video game context clues, such as written instructions, to divine that your job is to feed the titular creatures that live there. In the beginning these are recognisable, if Wednesday Addams-adjacent critters, like the aforementioned raccoon, a raven, a mouse.
You prepare meals by bish-bash-boshing ingredients in your oven, and throw them at the cryptid in question, in a paper lunch bag. When they're pleased, they provide keys to open locked cupboards or rooms elsewhere. The whole house is a strange puzzle cabinet, and it all makes sense in context, because the context also covers an infinite pantry with a poltergeist, a
Total Playtime: Extremely Online Beef People
Plus: the idealogical opposite of Rivers Cuomo
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.
It is once again time for Total Playtime, which this week sees Alice, Brendy and myself gather to pick over the major news topics of the moment: AI-based hardware shortages, the ongoing mishaps of Highguard, and the political implications of asking a lot of people to make cat noises. I must warn you that this is preceded by a lengthy preamble on parents injuring themselves, the absolute bullshit that is being middle-aged, and Big Pharma's devious attempts to distract you from the altogether more affordable health solutions of Medium Bee.
Total Playtime 29: Extremely Online Beef People
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These matters dealt with, we can move on the major issues. First up: the insatiable demand for vibe coding, fake girlfriends and plagiarism is sucking all the RAM out of the market and that problem is spreading from PCs to consoles and also everything else, because everything has a memory chip in it now because how can it possibly show you targeted advertising without one. The
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