But seriously, folks: the sun dying will actually wreak a terrible toll on the once-verdant earth and force you to eke out a dangerous living in monster-infested catacombs far beneath the soil. I love the concept of a dungeon that's marginally better lit than the surface, but it sucks down here. I keep being forced to shove gargoyle teeth into my gums, and there are massive magic bees everywhere. 

Each screen of the dungeon consists of four rows of four squares each, and each turn you choose one row to move to, landing on a random square. Some contain traps or monsters, others treasure or healing strawberries. You always kill monsters, eat fruit, or collect treasure you land on, but traps stay. Monsters are aligned to either strength or magic, and your chosen hero has a numeric score in each. Land on a two strength monster with a one strength hero, lose one HP. Land on a three strengther, and lose two HP, and so on. 

"That's so much HP!", you wail, cravenly, producing a non-zero amount of spittle. "Why would I ever click on a row with a monster I can't handle on it? Am I stupid?!". It's fine. All adventurers are stupid, it's part of the job description. The reason you'd do that is because it might be the only sensible choice. Click the all-monster top row, and you're guaranteed to take damage. Go for the bottom, and you've got a 75% chance of getting some treasure, but you might land on your third toxic mushroom and die instantly. The very basic idea is to make the least worst choice each turn until you've knocked out enough squares to move on.

Except you might not actually want to play it safe - you might want to snaffle up treasure so you can buy handy, single use items from the merchant to counter the spiraling difficulty: healing potions, monster-killing arrows, a die that rolls a new room. Or, you might want to save your coins to pop in the bucket that takes them to the surface. Surface gold is safe gold, spendable between runs to diversify the dungeon's offerings, and also on a few new characters and upgrades. So: village coffers, or personal glory? 

It's a much zestier approach to roguelike upgrades than plain buffs, since you're often just buying the chance to benefit - expanding a pool of possibilities with few guarantees that, say, the merchant will have the toothpaste you just spent a fortune to unlock. And I love how bloody dungeony this all is. Everything is either elusive, expensive, a bit shit in ways you can imagine a fickle god getting a mild chuckle out of, or is some variety of monkey's paw, bottle imp, or that time Beat Saber added 3D stages but only for Imagine Dragons. 

Here is one such paw. You'll encounter your first gargoyle statue quite early, but you can't interact until you've paid the stars to grant it teeth. After that, you get a choice of paired benefits and drawbacks. You sought a seat at the table of the powerful, and now you must eat your steak and gravel pie. A tooth might offer a 51% attraction bonus to strawberries, but also minus one permanent health. 

"Attraction?" you ask, as if this is the first time you've yanked a tooth and replaced it with an ensorcelled stone fragment. Gaze upon Sol Cesto's UI. As beautifully byzantine as it looks, you'll work out what everything means quickly, putting aside a couple of mysteries I still haven't fully untangled. The bottom left displays your attraction - that is, the probability you'll land on a specific type of dungeon thing when you move to a row. 

You might, occasionally, think you've cheated the teeth system. "Fewer magic monsters and more strength monsters? That's just what my Knight wants!". Ah, but now there's a wizard rapidly locking up all the chests and strawberries, and you keep landing on giant frogs. "Fine," you think. "I'll just go all in on treasure chests and increase my gold multiplier. Sod the consequences. Look how many arrows I have!". But, oh no, the next room is full of mimics, and fate has decreed you must shove your head between their gaping lids like a bumptious lion tamer.

Each hero also has both a passive ability and a sun power that charges up when you knock out squares. The warrior's passive occasionally lets her keep the items she uses, for example, while the knight's power lets them move to a random square in a vertical line every four cleared squares. The sun powers add a bit more agency to the short stretch early on where things can get sludgy and repetitive - after you've got your bearings but before you've unlocked much. But then layers start unfurling. More attraction modifiers to play with. More choices to make. More tricks to help you pull one over on lady luck and her endless procession of woebegotten egg beasts.

It's all just random enough to allow for the anecdote-worthy micro dramatics of dicely highs and lows without ever feeling outright capricious. There comes a point in each failed attempt where you can see death coming. You've delved deep, strawberries are rare, everything hits like a truck driven by a massive magic bee, and you're losing the fight against entropy. But it very rarely ambushes you with a hopeless situation. You can always slow down on the risk taking, and you'll soon stumble upon several ways to stash your gold when you spy doom descending from the rafters, speckling your hair with anticipatory dribble.

But what truly makes Sol Cesto sparkle is its menagerie of snarling bastard gribblies to meet and get dungeon sausage'd by, and the many hidden interactions and quirks to unearth and experiment with. Pull the merchant's nose. Go on. See what happens. There are shades of something like a Balatro here in the way the percentages and modifiers and clinking coins let you indulge your ludomanic impulses from a safe perch. But all that arid serotonin coaxing that Balatro openly wallows in is lent so much soul and character by Sol Cesto's playful details. 

A flute piece floating around in a magic pool? What does that do? I suppose I better find the rest. What's with the snake sporting disconcertingly regular human hands who provides esoteric hints in exchange for gold? Why does this imp keep clawing his way around from behind the UI, and why must he mock me so? 

It's really bloody dungeony, is what I'm saying. All the overt luck manipulation and math should make Sol Cesto feel calculator-brained, but it feels tricksy DM-brained. Riddle and imp pilled. Look at all this lovely fan art. It's what you get, I think, when you stuff in so many odd, personal-feeling discoveries for players to feel clever about finding that they have no choice but to fall in love. The game's art is also very special, of course, but you don't need me to tell you that. What a brilliant way to hide from the sun. 

Videogame studios aren't monoliths, writes Hayes Madsen, responding to an article that tried to draft fantasy developers for Microsoft IP from the burning remnants of last week's layoffs and divestments.

Xbox's franchise-first approach is bad for a number of reasons, but this kind of coverage is endemic of a major problem that has plagued games media for years, even decades - the idea that studios are monoliths. Studios make games, not the hundreds of people that make up a studio. I'm certainly not going to claim I haven't been guilty of the same thing in the past, but we need to do better.

I hadn't even heard of this game, but Lewis Gordon reviewed D-topia, a scifi puzzle game about AI, for The Guardian.

It arrives at a moment when AI has never been more contentious, lauded by AI company execs as the saviour of the world’s thorniest problems, and lampooned by those of a more sober disposition as a driver of further misery. But Marumittu Games is never alarmist: it is smarter than that, subverting cosy trappings to insidious effect, letting its existential questions hang in the unnervingly scentless D-topia air.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation covered Sony's decision to stop producing physical games, from the perspective of the consumer rights that will be lost in the process.

Physical media comes with a "right of first sale," which means you can lawfully share, resell, alter, or destroy your own copy of a copyrighted work. This right has also helped protect the emergence of alternative community servers, and emulator addition of online play to games from the dial up era.

But courts have held that digital media doesn't carry the same right, meaning no such protection is afforded to digital purchases. Your ability to freely share games with friends or pass them on to family members becomes totally subject to the whims of the distributor.

I think there are situations where clones of games are acceptable, but there are many more when they're not. For 404 Media, Nicole Carpenter explored how AI is making cloning games easier than ever.

It was a promising response for a commercial game developer that quickly turned unsettling. Within days, someone responded to her post with a vibecoded version of Holmér's prototype: "This can be built into a game by tomorrow." Another popped up in mobile app stores. Holmér said she saw up to four vibecoded versions of her prototype. Generative AI has made the work of plagiarizing an idea a lot simpler.

Brendy is Jank's resident Ace Combat pilot, and he sent me this lengthy look at the geopolitics of three of the games in the series. If you're getting ready for Ace Combat 8, due later this year, this is for you.

The player character here - Galm-1, callsign "Cipher", alias "Demon Lord of the Round Table" (hell yeah) - is not part of a state military. Instead, he's one of many mercenaries hired by Ustio after most of their Air Force is wiped out in the first days of the war. Mobius might as well have been the divine sword signifying the mandate of heaven, and Blaze the chosen king leading his army into glorious battle. They fight to prove that heroes will always rise against the darkness, to protect the end of history from the sickness called war. Cipher fights to get paid.

Derek Lieu has made a lot of videogame trailers. In this video, he lays out common mistakes made by developers when making them, and offers a recipe for doing it better. I think this is interesting analysis even if you're not making a trailer yourself.

For noclip2, Jeremy Jayne bought a physical game just to feel something.

Sometimes you spend an entire week trying to get into Hatsune Miku songs only to finally conclude, no, these are just not for me. So here's an old classic by The Pharcyde.

Sleep well, videogames.

This newsletter is normally scribbled by Jonty. But this week he's missing, presumed on holiday. I'll do my best to fill your eyes with games industry newsbits in his absence. This will be difficult. I've been distracted because I have only this week learned of Jimothy, a creature which is either a raccoon in Seattle with shortened spine syndrome, or the latest cryptid stalking America, depending on who you ask. Anyway, I'll try. Onto the videogames.

Here at Jank

We began the week with a brawl. The season finale of Character Select (in which we pit game characters against one another) saw Max Payne, Octodad, Dog from Half-Life 2, the Flood from Halo, and SkiFree's Yeti having a free-for-all fight. The winner is yet to be decided.

Jay Castello reviewed The Incident At Galley House. a murder mystery detective game that is based on cult interactive fiction piece Type Help. It is almost guaranteed to be this year's The Roottrees Are Dead, and not just because it is made by the same developer. Here's some of Jay's words.

The game is constantly making you feel smart... I feel like someone might come and put their hand on my shoulder in real life while I'm focused on my monitor, but I also feel like I'd be genre savvy enough to survive the ensuing horror movie.

Here's a fun new browser tool that lets you make collage art from old magazines on the Internet Archive. I used it to make a very professional advert for Jank.

In a much-anticipated article, Alice Bell eviscerated Dungeon Crawler Carl and boosted our subscriber numbers by an unholy amount in the process. Turns out a lot of you dislike bad writing. My favourite dunk is when Alice describes the book as an "extended Reddit post". But there are many other passages to enjoy. Here's a snippet.

More than that, it's dead. Nothing comes alive, adjectives are rare and a vanishing few of them are sensory. The dungeon is "dark" and "big". Goblins turn up a lot in this book, and the first Carl meets look "much like they did in movies and video games." Masterful stuff.

For the Total Playtime podcast this week, Nate and Jonty workshopped potential Alien Isolation sequels. I haven't listened to this yet but I'm sure it was a very serious discussion.

Graham went camping, but not before he gave everyone three more game recommendations to play over the weekend.

And finally, I got annoyed at Microsoft.

That was all our work. Now, let's rubberneck at the rest of the games media and see what they've been reporting.

Above all, do no Sharma

Let's start with the choicest meat. Microsoft is still in a tailspin of bad press due to its ongoing layoffs. It is trying to recover from this deadly plummet with numerous PR escapades. For example, the director of Doom at id put his head above the parapet to reject the assertion that the studio is in a bad state, which is exactly what your manager would say after giving 50% of your colleagues the boot. To get the perspective of those actually affected, Chris Kerr at Game Developer spoke to some of the developers who've been laid off.

"Does Microsoft care? Absolutely not. And they seem to actually put some level of effort and care into making it as painful as possible," added one source impacted by the cuts at id Software.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft is ignoring their bloodbath and have simply told Xbox to tell Bethesda to tell you that they are making the game you would have already guessed they are making. This is how Fallout 5 got panic-announced, alongside remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, and a new Fallout from Obsidian. But there is nothing of those games to actually show you, and there might not be for some time, seeing as the studios now have far fewer people to work on them.

This gormless "look over here!" did not distract Rebekah Valentine at Kotaku for long, who summarised the company's desperate distraction techniques as "shaking keys at us, as if we were toddlers."

Look at the sparkly, jangling games! Watch the big IP! We’re doing things that are so popular and good, you don’t need to worry about the thousands of lives being upended by rich people’s poor decision making! The games are good. That’s all that matters.

"It's important that it looks like shit"

Here's some other little stories from the week, starting with the funniest and quickly descending into despair.

Slay The Spire 2 developers spoke to Gamespot about why they intentionally choose to put in rubbish MS Paint placeholder art instead of using awful generative AI placeholders. "If we use art that looks nearly complete," said studio co-founder Casey Yano, "then people would think that that’s going to be the final art. It has to look like shit. It’s important that it looks like shit."

As if the paycheck massacre at Microsoft wasn't painful enough, ZA/UM is also laying off a third of its workers just months after releasing their (pretty good) follow-up to Disco Elysium. I'm sure people will be entirely normal about this.

Valve say the memory and component crisis is "still getting worse", which means no cheapening of the Steam Machine any time soon. That's okay. I was more likely to buy PlayStation's fighting stick, but, ah, that is also now postponed due to "unexpected production delays" and also it costs £180, so actually fuck that.

Marathon game director Joe Ziegler is leaving Bungie. That's ominous.

Speaking of Bungie cast-offs, an unconfirmed multiplayer Halo game has been cancelled, according to a YouTuber who spoke to staff at Halo Studios. Rumour has it the game was going to be "big team battle" inspired, and players could fight as both Spartans and the alien Covenant Elites. Many Jank readers may give anything between zero and one figs about this, but I have always liked a Halo shootout. So, boooo. 

The Washington Post selected Doom as one of the most influential pieces of U.S culture, alongside Moby Dick and Levi's jeans. Should somebody tell Xbox? Why bother. As friend of Jank Nic Reuben says in his review for Doom: The Dark Ages' Revelations (the latest DLC for the medieval shooter):

For the last decade, Id have made Doom from a place of willing uncertainty. They’ve defied common wisdom and trends and made their own path, and in doing so have made both fumbles and some of the best and most important shooters of the modern era. This was not enough for Microsoft and Xbox, because Microsoft and Xbox do not care whether they’re in the business of games, or corn, or cigarettes, or paintbrushes, or selling tech to the Israeli military, or silkworm farming. They are, like so many that own great swathes of culture, in the business of infinite growth, and great art is wholly irrelevant. Revelations is fucking great art.

That's your lot

Summer has engulfed Ireland like a wave of boiling lobster water into a gutter outside a fancy restaurant. I am extremely warm. This is making me cranky and I no longer wish to type. Normal Jonty business will resume next week, and all you sweet newbies will see just how dense with links that man can make these newsletters. 

May Jimothy have mercy on your soul.

This is not that. The wrecking ball currently crashing through Xbox is anything but cleansing. If we are to use a word or phrase to describe the ongoing layoffs, why not reach for words which truly reflect the human cost, impact and intent of the action. How about "bloodletting" or "demolition job"? What about "slash and burn"? This is an act of cutting, violent in its method, drastic in scope and ultimately a form of self-inflicted loss. It is not a "reset". This is an amputation.

I have written before about how language becomes mangled by corporations seeking to avoid scrutiny, guilt, or repercussions when cutting jobs. Businesses are loathe to use plain descriptive words that accurately explain what they are doing. This is not new, and it's not unique to the games industry. Job cuts become "restructuring". Studio closures (or project cancellations with the accompanying layoffs) become "sunsetting". 

A reset is quick and painless.
An amputation is a traumatic loss. 

This is always annoying, but let's take it as an opportunity to be better wordsmiths than the sellout hacks who work in the damage control departments of big tech. If publishers and megacorps are free to use poetic license to obscure an ugly act, then journalists, commentators, and the public are likewise free to use the same laws of lyricism to drag that ugly act back into plain sight. 

Don't say "restructuring". Say massacre.

These people did not get "let go". Their monthly paycheck got blindfolded and shot in the head.

Xbox is not undergoing a "reset". It is performing an idiotic act of auto-cannibalism. 

Maybe you think this is hyperbole. Nobody has died, you might say, so calm down with the gory metaphors. But that's the thing. Bloody analogies are more accurate than the crisp, clean propagandising of Microsoft's marketing department. In their metaphor, the corporation is a cute machine that needs a little tap of a tiny switch round the back. Oopsie! Let us just ctrl-alt-del our way out of this silly mess, ha ha. What are we like! But in a more emotionally correct metaphor the corporation is a human body. To fix what the company considers a sick body, they are taking a hacksaw to its shins. 

Already Microsoft has framed its actions as a necessary dose of salts following the over-indulgence of previous leadership. Even some in the games media seem eager to adopt this narrative - that Phil Spencer and his Game Pass strategy was an ill-advised spending spree which has come to a head and now requires correction. Corporate consolidation under Spencer was never a good thing, and it probably was unwise from a bookkeeping perspective. But I don't think it's the core reason a business still making huge profits must put concrete boots on one-fifth of its workforce and dump them in the nearest LinkedIn feed. You have probably already guessed the grander reason. Yes, I'm sorry, it's AI again.

Aside from the fact incoming regimes love to lay all blame at the feet of previous regimes, it's easy to see why Asha Sharma and her team find corporate revisionism preferable to the much more obvious bullshit that is stinking up the entire boardroom. The former head of AI at Microsoft is cutting money in one part of the company, while an even bigger amount of money is being pumped into Microsoft's efforts to keep the AI bubble inflated. Is this significant? Who can possibly say. 

This is why I hyperbolise. A freakish monster indulging in a sanguinary act of self-breakfasting is the defining image of Xbox today. The beast is eating its own legs to drive a hunger that cannot be sated. The craving for capital to pump into AI is driving corporations to hawk their stock and sack their best. Xbox is slicing off its own limbs, extracting its own kidneys, taking out its own eyes, feeding long-helpful (and profitable!) parts of its body to an adjacent machine that has not yet made anyone on earth, except stockbrokers and CEOs, a single penny. 

I'm not interested in interrogating the financial rationale behind all this (for that please listen to Jonty on our podcast - the level-headed voice of reason who has probably seen Microsoft's spreadsheets). I have no interest in forecasting how good or bad the profit margins will look now that they don't have to pay all those pesky human beings. I only want to extend my metaphor to its conclusion and encourage other writers to avoid linguistically shilling for the shitcanners, even if it is mostly by accident. This is not a reset. Xbox might survive this desperate frenzy of gobbling its own intestines for sustenance. It will hobble about and put all its weight on a single straining Fallout 5, trying to pick things up with one fingerless Halo remake. It won't wake up tomorrow clean and refreshed, ready to start over again at some undefined save point in the past. A reset is quick and painless. An amputation is a traumatic loss. 

Even for those who remain, the psychological fallout of losing half your co-workers to the slop compactor is coupled with the ever-dangling axe threatening to fall on you next (the company still plans to cut 1600 jobs and nobody knows whose payslips are going to get disappeared in the night). It will be hard under those conditions for many workers to make good art when they think at any moment they may find themselves struggling to pay the rent. What about this feels like the quick, sharp flash of black and the hopeful boot noise that accompanies a reset? Nothing.

I don't think many of my co-blatherers in games media are actually convinced by Xbox's propagandistic word use, but some keep using the word "reset" nevertheless, enshrining it in those protective quote marks, because it has become a handy shorthand to refer to the ongoing mass enfuckenating of livelihoods (it's also short, which works well in a headline, like, uh, the one on this article). But as you can see from the paragraphs above, it is far more fun to find a new way to describe the layoffs in language not endorsed by Microsoft's slopmaster-in-chief. So please, don't use Sharma's shitty little trinket word. When you see a bonesaw severing away at people's lives, dip your pen in the blood and write brutal truth. Xbox is dismembering itself.

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

The Mermaid Mask

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!

Jet Set Radio if instead of a skateboard you were flipping and grinding as a train on a set of impossible tracks spread across a colourful, dystopian Japan. I don't know how it feels in the hands, but it's dripping with style, and I'm already hooked on the soundtrack. I also need to make time to play this.

Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit

Cozy Grove is a life-sim in which you craft, fish and tend to the needs of ghosts upon a lush island. Camp Spirit is the sequel that looks like it offers more of the same. "Cozy" is right there in the title and there's a heavy emphasis on making a game that's even more relaxing than your typical Animal Crossing 'em up. It's also by Spry Fox, makers of early beloved mobile word game Alphabear.

Or you could be playing The Incident At Galley House, which takes the excellent text deduction game Type Help and adds audio and visuals by the developers of Roottrees Are Dead, and which Jay reviewed for us earlier this week.

I would have been playing Galley House this weekend but alas, I am camping this weekend. I'll probably have fun once I'm there. Tell us what you're playing below, in the internet's best and only comment section.

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. 

Other events in this episode include a spirited effort to issue me with a fake dog, a carbonara that will get you killed by Italians, and a chance meeting with a famous lungfish in a subterranean vault. Plus: a sex toy by a company called Mediocre Dragon, a biologically accurate mouse called Gerald, and a name for Nate’s first racehorse.

This episode is entirely funded by paying supporters of Jank (and for one month more, backers on Patreon) and we thank them for their patronage. The artwork (now feat. Brendy’s face) is my Marsh Davies, the music is by God Ribbon and the editing is by Alix Attenborough. Send your Alien Isolation sequel ideas to totalplaytimepod@gmail.com, or share them in the comments or the Jank Discord. 

Links!
Jonathan Frakes Asks You Things. The Italian approvers are Lionfield. There are some episodes of Noel’s House Party up on YouTube along with tours of the remains of Crinkley Bottom. We heartily endorse Feral Vector. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? featured the legs of Mrs Herman. Mouse Hunt (1997). The Houses of Parliament are disintegrating. I wrote about Bad Magpie for Jank. 

Games!
Jurassic Park Survival, The Lost Wild, The Park, Rogue Legacy, the OG Slenderman title was Slender Man: The Eight Pages but the more polished debut was Slender: The Arrival. Bad Magpie. Untitled Goose Game. Far From Noise. Hot Date. 

Recommendations!
The Whalefall teaser, Whalefall by Daniel Kraus, get yourself a nice office chair (with a mesh back, you'll appreciate it in this weather). 

This version of Dungeon Crawler Carl is dedicated to the star of one of the greatest, most inspiring, most amazing survival stories of our time.

Fiona.

Fiona the hippo. 

Yes, I am dedicating this book to a goddamned hippopotamus. 

Sorry, Mom.

It really has everything. A zaniness hovering between being insecure and smug. Graceless repetition because the prose wasn't structured properly in the first instance. A self-conscious swearword to indicate that what's happening is funny. A gesture toward emotion as an afterthought. My god, if it isn't a perfect distillation of the whole book. 

I picked up Dungeon Crawler Carl on a recommendation from multiple people I trust, and now will never trust again. It's the first entry in a LitRPG series that is both self-published online (visionary auteur Matt Dinniman has kept the digital rights, an incredibly baller move) and now trad-published in book stores. 

Dungeon Crawler Carl has an air of originality because, while LitRPGs have been popular in countries like Japan, Korea and Russia for a while, this time it's about a cool white American dude. Our titular Carl is 6'3", jacked, and weirdly defensive about having been a member of the Coast Guard. Without warning every building on Earth and anyone inside them is destroyed - "splattered into dust" at "approximately 2.23 am", as we are told on literally page one, and if you think that's another sign of bad things to come, you're correct. 

"The times when Dinniman writes something dense with subtext, it's because he's done so accidentally"

Objectively incorrect use of words and their meanings aside, the set up is fine, I guess. The middle of the planet is transformed into a multi-layered videogame-esque dungeon by the genocidal aliens now in charge. Carl, along with a prize showcat called Princess Donut belonging to Carl's ex-girlfriend, and several million other members of humanity, take their chances in the dungeon. Their exploits as Crawlers are televised across the galaxy in a daily reality TV show.

The LitRPG genre leaves in the tedious grinding and stat fiddling that you do in a videogame, but sort of excise from your memories of playing it. In Dungeon Crawler Carl, your brain has to suffer through multiple paragraphs like: 

"She also received a dozen Heal scrolls from a Silver Survivor's Box. That one was rewarded to her because she'd ended a boss battle with less than 5% of her health. The scrolls were good to have because there was no countdown between reading each one, and even better yet, we could use the scrolls on each other."

I didn't have a specific quote in mind then, I just opened the book at random. There's even a supporting character who's the head of the Tutorial Guild and may as well be called Basil Exposition. Info dumps like this happen once a page or so, sometimes in the middle of the universally boring fights, and are all delivered in this repetitive, basic style with very few sentences of varying length. It's leaden. 

More than that, it's dead. Nothing comes alive, adjectives are rare and a vanishing few of them are sensory. The dungeon is "dark" and "big". Goblins turn up a lot in this book, and the first Carl meets look "much like they did in movies and video games." Masterful stuff. I will give Dinniman an amount of credit for coming up with a reason why the dungeon is full of references to Earth pop-culture. And at least he shows more restraint than Ernest Cline.

You might think, as a literate person who has read at least one book before (something that cannot be assumed of the nomination panel for this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award, for which this extended Reddit post is on the shortlist), that some - nay, any - of the loot and tutorials are consequential. That's because you're a fool. Three act structure? Get out of here. What's an act? What's a structure? What's a three? Surprising and delightful callbacks are for pussies. Everyone knows the most exciting part of the book is the inciting incident, so Dungeon Crawler Carl dares to ask: what if the inciting incident was just the entire thing?

Despite the fact it wears the superficial trappings of excitement (i.e. a lot of explosives), it's really boring. Carl is our POV character, and he and Donut never get close to failing. A major part of the middle of the book is them meeting a bunch of OAPs from a retirement home. In a normal story Carl would underestimate them, but it would turn out one of them was a ranged DPS wizard who fought in World War II, or whatever. Carl would have his assumptions challenged.

"That boss is, incidentally, the first woman and person of colour to turn up in the book"

What actually happens is: Carl is correct that old people are a useless liability, comes up with a plan to save them all while they cower, and then decides that they're better off dead because keeping them safe "isn't a kindness" compared to them being crushed to death earlier. This sequence of events happens twice.

Because although I have met many protestations that this book is fun (I think this is predicated largely on the fact that the dungeon AI is written as having a foot fetish over Carl, and that Donut gets Carl into scrapes and he shouts "Godammit Donut!"), the whole thing comes across as mean-spirited. Half the bosses Carl fights are formed from genetically altered human beings, which Carl theorises are parodies of humanity that the aliens have created for their amusement. They also seem like parodies of people Dinniman, a middle-aged white lib bro, finds kind of annoying.

The first boss they fight is called The Hoarder, "a human woman, about 35 years old, enormously fat. She wore a filthy and ripped T-shirt and no bra, and her skin was covered in open sores and scabs. A blue pair of sweatpants with the word 'PINK' along the leg appeared to be stretched to their limits. Her black hair clung to her head in clumps." She has been made 15 feet tall and vomits giant cockroaches, and pleads for help in Spanish. Carl immediately decides he has no choice but to punch her in the face to death. Then he goes to the Tutorial Guild to learn about bosses.

That boss is, incidentally, the first woman and person of colour to turn up in the book, although examples of both are briefly shown to be kicking some amount of ass elsewhere. Dungeon Crawler Carl has a lot of the same boring, low grade, benevolent nerd misogyny and racism that real life does - you get the sense that Carl would be impressed if he saw a woman order a pint of beer - and as such it is barely worth discussing. I will note, though, that my favourite description in the book is probably "her features were Asian, but with long blond hair she kept in a tight bun". The times when Dinniman writes something dense with subtext, it's because he's done so accidentally.

Later, Carl and Donut talk their way into a Goblin base, and rig up an explosive to kill the Goblin boss without having to actually fight him. But! The room is also full of goblin babies, which makes Carl "feel like an asshole", because he's "all about killing as many goblins and monsters as I could" as long as they're not children. Except mere moments before, he learned that adult goblins are sentient and have hopes and dreams. One of them longs to "have peace and a place to live and breed and have our little ones run free and not worry about killing for survival." 

In the hands of a skilled writer, the juxtaposition between cartoon violence and the reality that this is murder as entertainment would create something interesting. You've probably already thought of three examples of stories where this is the case. There's something to be said for how, in a game, you'll just do what the UI tells you without thinking, and sure Toby Fox has said a lot of it already, but you could try your own version. 

Dungeon Crawler Carl doesn't attempt to make any points beyond gesturing at the setting, and I felt like expecting anything beyond that would be like asking a child to do their homework before they booted up the Xbox. It's a book so empty of actual thoughts that this works in its favour, because Dungeon Crawler Carl echoes back whatever any reader brings to it. It's an anarchistic satire of capitalism. It's just a bit of fluff. It's funny. It's not meant to be funny. And so on. 

"Near the end of the story, Carl starts to mutter, 'You won't break me' to himself every so often"

Sometimes Carl thinks about a bad thing that happened and feels sick, so he stops thinking about it and opens a loot box instead. It's not even effective enough to be mawkish. Often, it's as if Dinniman has been taken by surprise by his own premise, usually when the Dungeon announces the remaining player count every evening. "We'd gone below one million, and I hadn't noticed. For every person that ticked away, I felt I was losing a part of myself, a part of my humanity," our hero thinks, lyingly, towards the end of the book. I'd believe Carl if his behaviour bore any of this emotion out, but as it is I wouldn't believe a toddler if they told me they'd had enough Curly Wurlys while they shoved another one in their maw, either.

Near the end of the story, Carl starts to mutter, "You won't break me" to himself every so often, a phrase which the hardback has the utter gall to display on the front. Notionally it is aimed at the alien overlords running the game.

Here is a list of things Carl does in this book:

• War-crimes the Goblins
• Kills three bosses that used to be/still are people
• Dispassionately watches an OAP be killed
• Discovers some Crawlers kill other Crawlers and considers this as a disgusting violation
• Boobytraps a corpse to try to kill said Crawlers
• Thus causes the death of a teenage girl, but blames her mother for not understanding the rules of the dungeon
• Slaughters a bunch of confused, unarmed sentient pigs
• Agrees to not talk badly about the corporation running the game for fear of reprisals
• Participates in every alien chat show demanded of him
• Blends, and subsequently drinks, a fairy

What would breaking you look like, Carl? How would it be different? It's not like you started out trying to level up as a pacifist. You didn't tearfully kill the Goblin boss at his own brave insistence because he knew you would turn out to be the chosen one. They don't need to break you. You arrived pre-broken.

The ending is the final indignity. If you're playing a game it makes sense that the last thing you do is futz around with your inventory and character build for an hour, and try to level up a mount or pet, before deciding to call it for the night. In a book it means you have no crescendo, and the final page might as well have read "buy the second one, fuck you."

I don't think this premise is low brow. I don't think a game-flavoured action romp is beneath me. I know that videogames are still not accepted as worthy of mainstream notice, and I know, too, that it feels good to see something you like being taken seriously, because that's like you're being taken seriously too! But I also think this book, specifically, does not respect itself or its reader, and you don't have to accept that. You're worth more than this.

The magazines are many. You can clip the curls out of Cosmo, the singers out of Smash Hits, and the parasites out of Popular Science. But of course there is a solid core of 1990s-2000s videogame mags to rip and/or tear from. PC Zone, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Nintendo Power, and Play are the ones that show up the most. You can also add your own PDFs to snip from, if you are so inclined.

The tools are simple - slice and dice, click and drag, undo, and shift the clipouts from front to back. Export your final collage when you're done and show off to friends who I guarantee will not care about your finished masterwork but will care that they can go and make their own. Creator Sami Smith is also responsible for making a site where you can browse Wikipedia as if it is an old Windows desktop. If you're too cool for collage. Pfft.

I made an advert for Jank. It is loud. I'm thinking of printing it out and distributing it by hand on the bus this evening.

Like I say, we love a browser-based internet toy that you can muck about with while your boss is not looking. The emoji-smooshing of Infinite Craft and the word-fiddling of Fridge Poetry are two of our favourite games of the decade so far. And I recently enjoyed a zoom about in Google's web browser flight sim, mostly by crashing straight into their headquarters.

All these are yet more proof that you should probably stop buying graphics cards and RAM (as if you even could right now). PC gaming does not require the big rig to be pumping out all the frameses pers secondses and choking your room with blue smoke. It can sometimes just be about running silly playthings in a secret tab.

The whole mystery unspools in these aural moments: people arguing and suddenly discovering dead bodies, the thunderstorm a constant accompaniment. It's a game that is predominantly a listening experience. Which is why it's surprising that The Incident at Galley House began life as Type Help, a text-based browser game. 

Although the puzzling itself has been expanded, this transformation is predominantly a case study in the power of UI. I found Galley House's story to be solidly "pretty good," but combined with this upgraded presentation - the clunk of the strange machine, the generator flickering out every so often, the voice acting and audio design - I spent plenty of time genuinely creeped out. This isn't something I've experienced while simply reading, but it's also not something I've experienced in any of the other games that Galley House is inspired by, like Return of the Obra Dinn or The Roottrees are Dead.

Galley House has a much stronger focus on this atmosphere than these games and others like them. While Roottrees and Obra Dinn also put you in the position of an investigator looking at events after they've happened, neither have such a persistent feeling that you are still within the events themselves. Yes, the deaths at the Galley house happened decades ago, but there's an immense sense that there's something wrong with the house itself. And you're inside it. At night. During a thunderstorm. The game's quasi tagline, "there are no ghosts in the Galley House!" starts to feel hollow. 

I'm not usually a huge fan of being creeped out, so this wouldn't inherently be a plus for me. But Galley House's central puzzle is so compelling that it entirely balances out the ongoing feeling of dread. I picked up the game on a Monday afternoon and would have finished it in a single sitting had I not had a pesky evening appointment with some friends. As it was, I came to my desk first thing on Tuesday and bashed out the rest, not with an eye to turning this review in early, but because I couldn't stop thinking about the satisfaction of correctly inputting a code and getting warped into a new scene. 

That's the micro-level satisfaction, but there's also a macro-level in figuring out what actually happened at the Galley house. This is spooled out gradually enough over the game that A) each new revelation provides its own beat of excitement and B) it's often possible to come to these realisations on your own without prompting from the characters who are also trying to work out what's going on. The game is constantly making you feel smart, and that's enough to cast its eeriness in a new light. Sure, I feel like someone might come and put their hand on my shoulder in real life while I'm focused on my monitor, but I also feel like I'd be genre savvy enough to survive the ensuing horror movie.

It helps that I never really got stuck. There's always enough open threads that you should be able to find a new scene with just a little poking around and rereading - especially when helped along by the system, familiar to Roottrees players, which flags moments that have clues you haven't fully exhausted yet. I was never frustrated nor tempted to use the hint system. (Although, as with all puzzle games, your mileage may vary. The developer who sent me the code suggested it might take 10-13 hours to complete; I came in under seven. Yes, I am bragging.)

The only two moments that did give me pause were the game's two big twists, which both require creative use of the UI to wrangle. Both times I knew the answer to what the game was asking me, but not how to get it to recognise that I knew. And if the first was a teaching moment for the second, I'd think that was very clever, but for some reason what works in one doesn't work in the other, leading to a bunch of tinkering that threatened to deflate the end of the game.

But I'm tempted to say this actually worked in the game's favour, since by making me slow down over these crucial discoveries, they have stuck in my mind. I don't actually think that's true, but my temptation to say it is reflective of how much I like Galley House, and how much I want to overlook its minor niggles. 

There are no ghosts in the Galley house, but it certainly feels like there are, and it feels great to figure out what happened to them. Just don't think too much about why your generator keeps getting switched off, leaving you alone in the dark.

The survivors are listed in the headline above, however, keen-eyed readers may notice the presence of yet more "vs" between them - the dread abbreviation. Well done. You have discovered the truth: the great killing spree is not over. In this gore-soaked season finale, those who remain must now face off in a ferocious free-for-all. Only one will walk away. You, reader, will decide who.

Before we crack on to the battle royale. Let's review the destruction that came before. Thanks to all Jankers who commented with their version of events. In the fight summaries below we've selected our favourite battle outcomes from your collective twisted imaginings. Crowdsourced violence, it's the future of games journalism.

Harry du Bois vs Max Payne

The arena? A pharmacy.

Who won? Max Payne.

What happened?
"[Max Payne voice] I enter the pharmacy desperately looking for painkillers; I've got more holes in my body than alpine dairy, and they're all bleeding. I can hear my wife's voice telling me to let go. This is it, I've finally run out of asphalt to burn... Some blurry faced wino stumbles in front of me, blocking the main aisle. He mumbles something about lizard brains and failed revolutions, and raises a hand cannon to my face, a rictus grin already twisting his mouth. He's dead before I touch the floor... I down the painkillers and move on; the curse of life still weighing heavy on me, at least for now." - Dorga

"I can't find a way that the man who can die getting dressed wins this fight." - Tony B

The Xenomorph vs Octodad

The arena? An ice rink.

Who won? Octodad.

What happened?
"Octodad, ever the prepared suburban father, came equipped with ice skates, which he uses in an attempt to glide gracefully away. Instead, he trips over his own tentacles and takes a catastrophic tumble. In his frantic attempts to right himself, he accidentally slashes the Xenomorph with one of his razor sharp skates. The Xenomorph's acid blood immediately melts the ice. (This ice rink has 3m deep ice because that's the way ice rinks are in real life.) Octodad is now in his native aquatic habitat, giving him home court advantage. The Xenomorph... soon sinks to the bottom of the flooded rink. Once there, the Xenomorph suddenly remembers that it's perfectly capable of swimming, and feels very silly. It briefly considers murdering Octodad, but is too dejected and embarrassed to continue. Octodad wins." - disconcertinglymoist

"Secret mollusk, fearful stink, a spray of acid over ink. The conflict's over in a blink. All goes quiet in the rink." - I_have_no_nose_but_I_must_sneeze

Stardew Valley vs The Flood

The arena? Grandad's farm.

Who won? The Flood.

What happened?
"At 2am, all of Stardew Valley is either asleep or passes out. I suspect the Flood would succeed with a 4-hour uncontested takeover." - Dez

"If you give the Flood enough bundles of goods they will eventually rebuild the community center." - JimJamJamajesty

Dog vs Cat

The arena? A cardboard box factory.

Who won? Dog.

What happened?
"Cat is undone by the arena. Cat sees The Best Cardboard Box, sleeps in it, and forfeits the match to Dog." - Trithemius

"You know this is a big stompy robot, not an actual dog, right? That big robot just needs to do its big stompy thing and he's solved Schrodinger's paradox, in box or out, that cat is splat." - JimJamJamajesty

Thumper's Beetle vs SkiFree's Yeti

The arena: The world's ten most dangerous roads.

Who won? The SkiFree Yeti.

What happened?
"I've seen the Beetle crash and fail. I've never seen that damned Yeti go down. Even dodging it usually leads to speeding splat into a tree. The best that can be managed is to buy the shareware and hope it stops haunting you. The Beetle may manage a few loops through the Yeti's turf, but there's only one way this can end." - Anders (SeekerX)

"The Yeti is an unstoppable, inevitable force of nature. It cannot be sated, satisfied, or erased. Like energy, it can never be destroyed, only turned into another form. Where that other form is but another Yeti, clattering down the slope to nibble on the ankles of another hapless skier. The Beetle may be fast, but the Yeti is faster, and only one of these horrific boys has teeth. Nyam, nyam nyam nyam." - Dansk

"Yeti is an older and stranger power. Inertia and chrome are no defence against things that dwell in the deep forest and the high pass." - Decliner

The final battle

So, there we have it. Let these bruised warriors arrange themselves for the ultimate showdown. It's Max Payne vs Octodad vs The Flood vs Dog vs The SkiFree Yeti in a micro battle royale with only one winner. 

The Arena? The Office from The Stanley Parable.

The case for Max Payne: He has uzis and an opioid addiction.

The case for Octodad: He has the brain of an octopus and the heart of a dad.

The case for the Flood: They can infect other combatants...

The case for the SkiFree Yeti: The manifestation of death and time needs neither your rationale nor your support.

The case for Dog: Dog smash.

How is the winner chosen?

Simply use your imagination. How do you think this fight goes? Tell us in the comments, and enjoy the many deathtales from your fellow commenters. This is folk storytelling in practice. If folk stories were about robots, aliens, and depressed policemen.

We will choose the winner at the end of the week on a mysterious basis. We'll also be hosting a poll in Jank's subscriber-only Discord to help gauge sentiment while determining the final result, however this is not legally binding and we may choose to completely ignore it if, for example, we want to. This is not a democracy, but it is a place where your funny comment might get posted when we announce the final survivor. You just need to come up with a good, narratively pleasing (and relatively short!) outcome to this whole mess. What is this? A commentocracy? I don't know, I didn't study political science. I studied BLOODSPORT.

Good luck to all fighters. Die well.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced released this past week. For PC Gamer, Morgan Park played both it and the original back-to-back to produce a review that digs into the granular differences between them, and the question marks over remaking a game that's not that old and holds up quite well.

Ubisoft spent a generation transforming Assassin's Creed from a stealth-action power fantasy into a loot-driven RPG with spammy combat, and only now is it trying to make amends. Resynced feels like Ubisoft teaching itself how to make a proper Assassin's Creed again, and graded on that curve, it's quite good.

For Unwinnable, Jay Castello looks back at ten years of writing about videogames and how the space has changed in that time. Jay is too polite to name names, so who can say which website is being described below. It sure conjures a lot of complicated feelings for me, though.

Although it’s true that games media was male-dominated at the time, the first of those sites used to have enough women working for it that three of them had the same name. They now have eight people on staff and all of their bios use he/him pronouns.

Michael Brough, developer of 868-BACK (and many others), offers advice on how to write about indie games. There's plenty I disagree with here, but the crux of it - that too often positive writing about indie games is couched in negative framing - rings true.

Look, "niche" is not a property of a game. It's a recess in a wall to put decoration in. (Some games do have niches in them.) I guess you're using it in some metaphorical way to mean that the group of people playing the game is small enough to fit into a niche? This is not very interesting, and it is not even a fact about the game. You're telling us about the game because you like it! What do you like about it? That's way more interesting.

"Of course viewers are giving up on Netflix shows," Charles Pulliam-Moore writes for The Verge. Business people might tell you that it's competition from TikTok, and this article gives that theory some credence, but also offers several alternate theories, such as: the shows are crap.

Some of Netflix’s problems are rooted in its internal practices, like the way it tends to cancel shows right as they start becoming more expensive to produce. It also doesn’t help that, on the whole, the wait between seasons of series has been gradually getting longer, which makes it easier for people to lose interest.

Is taste less personal than it used to be? Rachel Aroesti goes long for The Guardian on the impact of algorithmic recommendations on fashion and culture, while interviewing the, uh, "style rebels fighting back". I'm guessing that was a copy editor trying to make too-online social media people sound exciting, but the article is mostly good all the same.

In his book, Chayka predicts a splintering of the internet into smaller independent platforms as this decade’s response to the distortion of algorithmic feeds. Two years on, he thinks “decentralisation is definitely here in the form of newsletter culture and Patreon-style crowdfunding models”.

Where did all the UK game events go? For GI.biz, Lewis Packwood interviews organisers from the likes of EGX, WASD, London Games Week and more to find the answers. I worked with several of those people and worked on several of the events mentioned, and the key point you take away should be: putting on successful events is really, really difficult.

The overwhelming expense of putting on an event is venue hire, which has rapidly increased in recent years, to a level that Game Republic co-director Jamie Sefton describes as "astronomical". "The reason why we didn't have a GaMaYo [Game Makers Yorkshire] for so long in Leeds was because we couldn't find a venue in Leeds city centre that was good – say, 10-15 minutes from the station – but that wasn't going to cripple us financially," he says.

This is great.

Music this week is グッドバイ ("Goodbye"), a seven-minute breakdown by Japanese math-rock outfit Toe. Listen to those drums! The album edit is below, but follow it by watching them do it live.

Sleep well, videogames.

Outside the well, we maintained our free-to-read regulars: our roundup of the best game writing, highlighting the new games you can play this week, the fortnightly Total Playtime podcast – which this week managed to discuss an actual papal schism rather than our ongoing fictional one – and of course this newsletter. 

Outside Jank entirely, Necrosis Week was followed by Bloodbath Week, as Xbox stormed out of the blocks by ditching five studios and laying off 1,600 people as an opener, with a further 1,600 to leave over the rest of the year, which is having exactly the impact on morale you might expect. 

The “good” news is that Double Fine and Compulsion Games are both returning to their original ownership along with the games they made and some funding towards their next one. That is sincerely not a bad deal, particularly for Tim Schafer, who has basically been paid unspecified millions to continue being Tim Schafer and continue to make Double Fine-ass games. This is philanthropy, albeit incompetently delivered, and it’s good that Compulsion also get to keep on their path although that’s cold comfort to all the staff that got laid off already. 

Things are more uncertain for Ninja Theory and Undead Labs, which have been sold, but they also get sent on their way with some funding so that’s something, and Arkane who are subject to French employment law and thus now embark on an extremely protracted negotiation. This will end in… something, and you’d put a few quid on Ubisoft but my bet is Atari because they have a French office and literally some money which is more than anybody else has.

The studios who weren’t sold simply had to experience brutal staff cuts along with the rest of the business. Total counts are uncertain but it’s looking like we lost half of id, a quarter of Obsidian, most of the Elder Scrolls Online dev team and more people than I can list across everything from user research and network support to the 27-year veteran who redesigned the Khajit in Skyrim. Those who survived are pointing out this will make games harder to finish, and they are being told to work smarter not harder, which is the sort of searing insight that gets you seconded to a national task force on jobs and productivity. 

Notable within the downfall was Bethesda’s proclamation that it’s basically going to stop doing new things in favour of exploiting existing things, so well done to whoever used the monkey’s paw to wish for another Obsidian Fallout game, and commiserations chiefly to those laid off but also to anybody who wanted more Avowed, Pentiment, Perfect Dark, or anything being pitched on the basis of creativity rather a five-year P&L with consistent recurring revenue. A week of absolutely poisonous commentary eventually yielded an unnamed announcement that id is still capable of making games, which speaks to the level of “good news” we’re working with here, and it will continue for months to come as the employment statutes of various non-American countries grind onwards to inevitability. 

Don’t let Xbox hog the layoff limelight, though: Ubisoft fired a bunch of Black Flag developers the day their game shipped, the Destiny 2 dev team issued players a commemorative badge to mark the occasion of them all being laid off, and IO shut down a studio after Xbox killed their publishing deal (although the game is still happening). It’s not looking great out in indie-land either.

Over in games media, there is a new old-school independent multiformat games website but obviously there were also layoffs as part of the ongoing collapse, please subscribe to Jank because that is the only way this whole thing works. 

What else? Mike Bithell’s new game is Britpop Dracula. Deathmatch Pokémon left Early Access and they didn’t change the price, which is nice. Embark has changed Ark Raiders matchmaking so you are no longer judged by the behaviour of your psychotic friends. Robert Yang switched his games to a free-to-play Gay As Service model although that is too gay for Steam. There was some huge drama about a hot werewolf in Love and Deepspace, which I didn’t understand, but there’s a comprehensive summary on TWIG which once again confirms that “Fandom” is becoming a 21st century version of “The Aristocrats”.

Let's see how the community got on. Hypatia has their will prepared after listening to this week’s Total Playtime. 

Ben King had one of several strong submissions on the best walls in PC games.

Caoimhe understood the mission.

That's all for this week. Go and play some PC games.

As Wall Week comes to a close, I want to take a sincere moment at the end of our overextended joke to talk about what we are building here at Jank, and why a paywall is more than just a turnstile charging an entry fee. This article is not paywalled - you're invited in.

When we talk about videogame walls for Wall Week, we're not always thinking of them as a divider. Even our own paywall, which is as porous and reliant on good will as any other, isn't meant to be some impassable and offensive barrier. If I build a wall in Age of Empires 2, or fix a broken one with a team of multiplayer engineers in Foxhole, I'm keeping my enemies out. But when I build a castle rampart or a cabin wall in Minecraft, I'm thinking of the future, a better time when I'll be safe and houseproud (castleproud?) enough to invite and entertain guests. It's this latter wall I want our paywall to be. This wall is not meant to lock people out. It's there to keep the roof over our heads.

So, if you have chosen to start paying for a Jank subscription this week (or if you gifted one to a friend) - thank you. You're essentially paying taxes toward our little realm.

Colourful metaphors aside, Wall Week is a silly joke we came up with to justify our demands for cash. But there is something earnest behind it. As we celebrate the dry brick textures of Counter-Strike or the zappy deathwalls of Dishonored, or even when we retrospectively stroke our chins at the era of waist-high walls and the trundling animations of Wall-e, what we're really doing is appreciating (in our admittedly weird and specific way) the silent craft of developers and artists across the planet. 

At a time when physical media is dying, livelihoods are being ransacked, AI is eating the planet, and any idea of ownership is dissolving into the depths of our glowing screens, it's important to remember that these illusory and ethereal worlds are nevertheless built by real people. By builders.

Which brings me to City Of Muse. In this short, free game you navigate the sunny streets of a post-disaster coastal town. All the residents have been mysteriously turned to ivy. By the time you meet the leafy woman who asks you the above question, you are lulled into a state of quiet appreciation. The game's title is accurate. Whoever built this city was inspired. 

I played the simple walking sim for the ten whole minutes it takes to saunter from the top to the bottom of its warm, twilit town. It is very likely you have not heard of this game until today. It was not especially spectacular or attention-grabbing. But that pointed question - are you a brick or a builder? - has stuck with me for years. Maybe it was the stressful career wobble I was suffering through at the time, or maybe I was just wistful that evening. Whatever it was, this line forced me, out of nowhere, to reflect. Did I want to be a brick - another nameless component holding up the edifice - or did I want to actually build things? 

For this reason (and many others that are not "a free Itch.io game told me to") I embarked on a sidequest to become a level designer - which eventually resulted in exactly one level design credit to my name. Not exactly a wild success story, but a tiny dream realised nonetheless. I came back to writing but the itch to build remains. So I will build. Not ancient tombs and sci-fi city streets, but a new career, reformed out of the foundations of the old. Maybe a little more laid back this time, a bit less ambitious. Imagine 16th-century Romans making a nice cattle paddock out of the ruins of the ancient imperial forum. This is, at least partly, what Jank is to me. Yes. You are standing in my cow field.

My point is that we're all building walls, and we're all doing it on top of something or someone who came before, inspired and supported. We are building Jank on the old, foundational ideas of an independent press, and we are supported by you. Just as someone at Matima Studios built the ivy -coated walls and terracotta rooftops as Unreal Engine assets that in turn allowed the creator of City Of Muse to build their own small, ghostly town. The walls of that city were laid if not brick by brick, then at least mesh by mesh; if not to last forever, at least to last a lifetime in a single player's memory. 

Collision is the bedrock of game design. A wall is a boundary, sometimes passable, sometimes immovable, always necessary. Let this week stand as a reminder to all creators that even the most overlooked games - and the most overlooked elements within a game - are essential. May your walls be built to last.

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

Moonlight Peaks

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

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 about being sucked into videogame worlds. Echoes Of Aincrad is set within one of the giants of that trope, the dismal Sword Art Online, offering a hack-and-slash fantasy action-RPG around the edge's of the show's first season. Reviews suggest you might want to unplug from the death game regardless of the consequences, alas.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink - Endless Ragnarok

If you want a higher grade of anime nonsense, Granblue Fantasy: Relink was a buoyant albeit traditional take on the format. Endless Ragnarok is its latest expansion, which adds new quests, higher level doozits, and summons, but otherwise offers the same colourful cascade of magic effects and damage numbers popping off. Give me days that are 28 hours long and I suspect I would be playing this.

It's been an exceedingly anime week, and I didn't even mention the new gacha game from Tower Of Fantasy's developers, the daftly titled NTE: Neverness To Everness. I continue to await the day when there are more anime-inspired games that aren't action-RPGs.

But you, tell us what you're playing down below in the internet's best and only comments section.

Why is any of this important? It's not, really, in 2026, but I spent a thousand hours learning how to make Half-Life maps when I was a teenager and 25 years later I'm still mentally trying to keep the r_speeds down.

"R_speed" stands for "render speed", the speed at which the GoldSrc engine is able to draw whatever is currently on screen. It's a console command you can turn on in any Half-Life level to cause a waterfall of stats to trickle down the console log like you just enabled the Matrix.

The constraints created by the need to wrangle these numbers is responsible for much of the design of the Black Mesa Research Facility. Why is Barney's reception desk not positioned in front of the corridor that leads you further into the facility? Maybe because the draw distance would be too far when you first stepped through the door from the tram and the r_speeds would tank, killing the framerate on whatever 3dfx Voodoo the player had installed alongside their Pentium 100. Instead, Black Mesa's architects and engineers constructed their underground research base almost entirely out of right-angle corridors that break up line of sight.

Half-Life aims low when it comes to visual density, but modders and mappers who wanted to wring more out of Valve's modified Quake 1 engine in the years post-release needed to develop new tricks for keeping r_speeds down even while increasing detail. That means more efficient brushwork, for a start.

Let me try to paint you a picture. A wall is typically a rectangle. A polygon is typically a triangle, and so a rectangle can be rendered by drawing just two polygons. But when two brushes touch, they divide each other's faces, multiplying the number of polygons rendered when drawing that surface.

Or let me just show you a picture, which I've nabbed from an old tutorial by de_dust creator Dave Johnston.

Now imagine the brushes touching are not a box and a wall, but a six-sided pipe (because Half-Life can't do smooth curves so all pipes have sides). That wall would be bisected along the edges of each side of the pipe. Suddenly your two-polygon wall consists of many, many more polygons when rendered, despite looking no different to the player. Fill your levels with pipes - and mapmakers love pipes - and suddenly your r_speeds are terrible.

The easiest fix? Don't let the end of the pipe actually touch the wall. Players can't position their heads close enough to the surface to notice the pipe just ends in mid-air, and most of them won't think to look anyway. Here's an example from Half-Life itself. It's not a pipe, but these cables suspending lights above Barney's desk don't actually meet the ceiling. It's been 28 years, but now you know why.

This is one trick among dozens. In my own amateur levels, I'd reduce the number of faces by letting brushes only touch at their corner. I'd fly around the level, finding surfaces that couldn't be seen by the player and painting them with a "{blue" null texture so the renderer had permission not to draw them. I'd over-scale certain textures because every repeated texture meant another split in the polygon count. I'd try desperately to work out how hint brushes worked so I could use them to tell the renderer to turn out-of-sight parts of the level on and off. And this is before I got to all the other level editing finesse, like placing clipping brushes to stop players getting snagged on detailed wall geometry.

Make a map for GoldSrc today and you won't really have to worry about most of this. There's still plenty of ways to construct a map such that RAD will fail, leaving your level without lighting, or such that the game will simply crash. But your audience likely has a computer good enough to render as many brushes as you can be bothered to make, and no matter how often you rub those brushes together. Most modern game engines also rely less on brushes in favour of other, more performant rendering techniques. This knowledge in my head is dead knowledge.

Except no knowledge is ever really dead knowledge. Nothing is ever wasted.

In many ways, learning how to make Half-Life maps made me who I am. I wouldn't have become a tinkerer without it. It remains one of the most complicated thing I've ever learned how to do and as a teenager, it gave me confidence. If I can learn how to do this - with the help of a generous community in the Valve Editing Resource Center - then I figured I could probably learn how to do other things, too. That alone was invaluable.

It has also, more straightforwardly, informed how I look at games. I can better see the engine constraints. I can better imagine the designer's hand at work. I can, for better and worse, see the Matrix. Most importantly - and this is still something more people need to learn in 2026 - I can see just how damned complicated videogames are. If the humble wall has this many considerations behind its construction, the existence of an entire videogame is practically a miracle.