Early on in your mission to drive the vampire occupiers from the New England town of Redfall, you’re approached by the local doctor. He presents you with a pocket watch that once belonged to his mother, and asks you to leave it on his father’s grave. A thematically vivid setup, certainly – but for an activity that, in the event, proves to consist entirely of walking up to a trigger point, pressing a single button, then schlepping back to base. At which point he hands you another mission of the exact same variety, and then another. These are not side quests, we should stress, but mandatory steps along the critical path. As Arkane missions go, it’s not exactly A Crack In The Slab.

It’s indicative of the kind of minor disappointments we keep bumping up against in Redfall’s opening hours. No player could fail to notice the emptiness of its openworld map, nor the plethora of bugs which persist through to the game’s launch. Yet more painful, perhaps, are those disappointments likely to be felt most keenly by devotees of the church of Arkane Studios. The kind of player who will take their first opportunity to sneak up on a guard and, rather than a brisk stealth takedown, unleash an awkward elbow nudge that only causes their target to turn and point a shotgun in their face. Who, on picking up a bottle of bleach or a gas mask, might find their mind suddenly alight with possibilities of how these could factor into the simulation – before realising they’re just a stand-in, immediately turning into a currency used primarily to buy more ammunition. Those who treasure moments of chaotic emergence in combat will find the old saw of grenades rolling down hills made difficult by a world that nails all of its environmental threats to the floor, effectively useless against any foe too stubborn and selfish to wait patiently in their blast radius.