The jay is a beautiful, rather spooky bird, its body the colour of old bricks, but with a slash of blue at its wingtips. They do not like to be seen, moving off at the slightest sound of visitors, and maintain their distance in brisk bursts of flight. There are jays in Atomfall, not that you’ll ever see them. Instead you’ll be walking through the Casterfell Woods on the trail of druids, or dealing with clumps of tooled-up outlaws, and you’ll suddenly hear the call of a jay on the wind. This call is neither beautiful nor spooky. If anything, it sounds a little like a dot-matrix printer sparking to angry life.

This mixture of natural wonder and outdated tech makes jays welcome companions in Atomfall, even if they are impossible to spot. They harmonise with the theme, which is the exploration of an irradiated stretch of the natural world, but in a counterfactual England of the early 1960s, where clanking robots exist alongside Bakelite phones and computer punch cards.

Atomfall asks: what if the Windscale nuclear disaster of 1957 had rendered much of the north of England nigh-uninhabitable? The answer is that space beloved of horror and survival adventures: a quarantine zone. Here, a game that seems to take its cues from Fallout and Everyone’s Gone To The Rapture unfolds. There’s crafting and combat among rosebay willowherb and abandoned retro-machinery as in Bethesda’s series. From Rapture, meanwhile, there’s a landscape plucked out of Constable, in which a wandering amnesiac must put together the puzzle of the recent past.