I’d found myself out of gaming around the mid-2010s. Sure, I had my go-to games (that were distressingly becoming ‘retro’) and weirdly found myself keeping up with gaming news despite my not having bought a video game in several years but actually putting time or money into any of the deluge of FPS or battle royale titles flooding the market? Wasn’t happening. Skip to September 2017: I’m in a new flat, in a city I vaguely know, waiting three weeks for a job to start all on my own. What’s more, luxuries such as television or internet beyond that of my pitiful data allowance were still days away. I had a creaky old laptop and the small number of books I’d managed to squeeze into my car on the way up North. I ended up booting up my neglected Steam account and scrolling through all the games I’d read about and swiftly avoided.

Then I came across Ori.