GROUND LEVEL

While Somerville plays with grand science-fiction concepts, it remains grounded through its central family. You’re not playing as the hero, Olsen says, but the extra in the background – something that informs the game’s allusive approach to storytelling. “I wanted to reflect how I feel as a civilian in our world,” Olsen says. “I feel like I don’t know half the story of anything to do with government.” It’s also key to how the art team have approached characters and environments, Simeonov explains: “We try to find the human perspective and put you in the shoes of the people that have lived through these events.” We’re particularly struck by the presence, right in the middle of the game’s first big vista, of a dog-waste bin.

TOP The setting is “an abstraction of the UK,” Olsen explains. ABOVE This shopwarehouse-turnedsurvivors-camp plays on the iconography of Waitrose. RIGHT This railway takes seconds to cross, but Jumpship’s art team has agonised over every detail