Splash Damage’s Brink, which takes place on a ruined floating utopia set adrift after the rest of the world has been reclaimed by the sea, dares to divert from the traditional first-person shooter formula, though it was tempting to fall back into the comforting embrace of cliche.

“Games are the least ‘writable’ medium conceivable,” said Splash Damage’s Ed Stern when asked how hard it is to bring new ideas to the run-and-gun genre. “It takes a lot of discussion and comparison and trial-and-error – or as I call it: error-and-error - because you’re working out what you need as you go. And I can see why it’s easier a lot of the time to just say, ‘Oh, space marines,’ because everyone knows what that means. It’s good for players and it’s good for concept artists.”

“But one of the cool things here is that we get to try new stuff,” he continued. “We’re trying to innovate in several fields at once: the gameplay, the setting, the look and all of these things…The longer I do this the less doctrinaire and dogmatic I get. I honestly thing there are no rules at all; anything could be fun, we just haven’t worked out a way of doing it yet. It’s all execution.”