What you will be able to collect are ingredients to concoct potions, which can be mixed to different strengths. You see, as well as health and all the other on-screen indicators, Geralt has to keep an eye on the toxicity of the strength potions he throws down his neck. Too many stimulants and our hero might get a bit woozy - with graphical on-screen wobbly effects to match.

Indeed, the game tester who’s sat beside us through all this was proud to announce that you can get drunk in the game, his grin suggesting that his own in-game benders might be more entertaining than those out of game. 

We’ve almost come full circle, but there’s more to come - the, ahem, adult nature of the whole shebang. We’re encouraged to approach a woman standing outside a cottage. Without much effort on our part, she offers to service us in an eager manner that’s a little too unnerving to be realistic (perhaps she knows who we are).

We try to back away from her advancing breasts, and although they’re as convincing a pair as we’ve witnessed in a game, we have to decline her offer of horizontal hanky-panky. Partly because it’s not something you want to do while you’re being watched, partly because there’s very little challenge to the whole encounter, but mostly because while the on-screen woman has the protruding charms of a younger Pamela Anderson, she has the face of a 90-year old hag. Never before, in-game or out, have we seen a more hideous visage of femininity. It may be a computer game, but we still have standards…