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They got me in Royal Fitchet in the end. It was between this little cluster of scruffy houses and the thin high street of Odd Bottom on-the-end that the pipe-smoking robots first appeared, marching in an unbroken line over a soggy horizon and sending me running for cold shelter, past a placard politely requesting passers-by to 'Please Drive Slowly' where the letters 'r' and 'v' had ominously dropped off. A couple of angry cracks of rifle fire later and I was left bleeding out in the shadow of Fitchet's war memorial, thinking I should have swallowed down a spoonful of marmalade when I had the chance. Sir, You Are Being Hunted's procedurally generated maps capture well a sense of drab English countryside, and more importantly they generate moments that can scratch their way into your conscience too. An open-world, open-ended stealth game, the freedom that's granted players in Big Robot's development debut is cleverly tempered by oppressive systems and a stuffy world of stale tea and biscuit-crumbs. In its current alpha state it's sparse, but there's potential here for one of those brilliant occasions where game mechanics are met and married with a memorable environment.
Having generated a new archipelago you start each game by a set of stones, with a fuzzy back-story delivered by a fuzzy-voiced narrator who sounds like a detached and potentially psychotic robo-Jeeves. Dotted around five separate islands, each connected by rackety wooden boats, are numerous artefacts to be collected, the ultimate aim to piece them all together so you can escape this dreary hell. Doing so isn't easy.
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