All superheroes have a moment in their origin story at which their existence transcends the mundane and they become something truly unique and wondrous. For Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man it wasn’t being bitten by a radioactive arachnid, or the murder of a beloved family member at the hands of a career criminal they’d previously let off the hook. No, for this particular superhero, it was learning to swing.

Movement was the very first thing the game’s developers worked on, quickly assembling an unfriendly neighbourhood of grey blocks for their prototype web crawler to work his way around. And it’s something they’ve been refining ever since - and will continue to do so, says Spider-Man Creative Director Bryan Intihar, ‘until the day the producers say stop, we’re shipping’.

Intihar is understandably proud of his game’s acrobatic combat mechanics, deeply nuanced narrative, and painstakingly reproduced approximation of Marvel’s New York City. However, he also knows that to achieve his aim of making not just a great Spider-Man game but the best Spider-Man game ever, it’s going to boil down to one thing: does the player feel like Spider-Man? “And for us,” says Intihar, “that’s traversal”.

Traversal is a deeply unsexy term for the sensual moveset Intihar’s team have created for their character. Naturally it also serves as an introduction to the game when I become one of the first outsiders to step into Insomniac’s Spidey-suit and am presented with our hero perched in iconic, leg-splayed pose atop a cooling vent somewhere in downtown Manhattan.