Thief came out in the same year as Half-Life and one the latter’s qualities I gravitated towards is that you weren’t Big Shooting Dude - just some scientist who is just trying to survive a disaster and accidentally discovers a talent for sowing death. Thief is even better than that.

Crunch and burnout are staples of a career in big box games. Telltale, EA, Team Bondi... studios have been named and shamed before. Has it made any difference to the wider industry picture? My dismissal of the latest AAA death march team story might be mistaken for apathy. It’s not.

I wrote about a similar issue in Mafia quite a few years ago when I had to trawl across an area to find an unassuming switch, the FPS equivalent of a point-and-click pixel hunt. Today, developers make totes sure this is painfully obvious using verbal direction, NPC demonstration, visual contrast and - my absolute favourite, readers - augmented reality markers.

First collect blue di-hydrogen crystals and craft them into jelly. Next, gather a ton of ferrite dust and set down your portable refiner which will turn them into pure ferrite after a short wait. Now don’t forget to fuel up your refiner with carbon - oh, you don’t have enough? Right, so off you go and kill some trees. Ohhhh, your mining laser is out of juice? You’ll need to collect carbon for that too… er, by punching trees.

A gloom hangs over an unsolved dance puzzle, a dread we might be in Turn 1 Dick Move territory. You made a mistake several steps back... and now it’s unfolding right in your face.

There’s something of 80 Days to Voyageur, but only something.

I am troubled that my own play style means I am rarely able to indulge a game when it is hot and I’ll miss out on something. Even a small thing, like how I’ll never understand how truly different the launch version was to the much-patched version now on Steam.

Add to this heady mix the sense that Rezzed, once a unique sidequest for those who liked off-the-beaten-track stuff, was becoming more establishment with every year. Amazon and Argos, for Chrissakes, had a presence on-site.

Thus every time I hear the future is multiplayer, I have a sense of dread. But usually that dread is tempered by the knowledge it is air as hot as horseshit. Multiplayer-first titles were a risky business, at the mercy of a curious chicken-egg syndrome: if no one is playing online, then no one is going to play online.

Who do I resent more when I am in the grip of an addictive game loop? The game designer or myself? Because Subnautica has me, boy does it. That first time I played I was just supposed to dabble with it in front of my children for about an hour but continued for the rest of the night, completely destroying my evening schedule. One involving sleep.