I’ve been taken prisoner. The cell - such as it is - is a shack made of what looks like corrugated iron, four rusted walls and a locked door. I’ve tried to hack at the walls with a stone hatchet I crafted out of some twigs and rocks that were in my inventory, but it doesn’t seem to be doing much. At least I could make a little campfire to crouch beside out of the remaining wood I was carrying around. My captor is taunting me with food, throwing rations through the open door now and then and closing it before I can dash out. I’m considering a hunger strike.

I didn’t even do anything to deserve this ridiculous situation. Here’s the thing: I wasn’t marched here at gunpoint by a gang of bandits after shooting someone with an arrow. I wasn’t even captured. There was no drama. I walked in here, My mistake was assuming that the guy I was following wouldn’t close the door on me the second I stepped inside. He built this place, you see. Only he can work the doors.

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Steam Early Access is a mixed blessing. It’s a chance to play games well before they’d otherwise become available, and a way for developers to get people to pay to be alpha and beta testers - a mutually beneficial arrangement, so long as everybody knows what’s involved. Often you end up trying to navigate something that’s barely playable, with a bunch of other people who have no idea what they’re doing and a few who’ve put in the time to become self-styled kings and queens of a half-broken game. That combination of factors can result in either riotous funtimes or frustrating tedium.

“ You start off naked in the middle of the wilderness, holding a rock.

There are several survival games in alpha or beta on Steam Early Access right now. There’s DayZ, the brutal zombie survival nightmare that started out as an ArmA II mod and quite rightly sent everybody nuts last year; play it if you ever need proof of man’s inhumanity to man, but good luck trying to get on a server that works. Then there’s 7 Days to Die, along similar lines, which ambitiously aims to let players craft, farm, domesticate animals and fortify abandoned buildings to protect themselves from the zombie hordes, but which currently looks like it’s from 1995 and is pretty unplayable. Then there’s Rust - it still has zombies, dotted sparsely around the place, but instead of urban survival it’s wilderness survival on an island full of other people. It’s the other people you need to watch out for. This is a much friendlier player population than you’ll find in DayZ, and on most servers people band together to survive, but it turns out they’re not above inviting you into their house and then trapping you inside for entertainment.

You start off naked in the middle of the wilderness, holding a rock. This rock will become your best and only friend. You use it to hit trees until you get wood, or hit rocks to get more rocks, or bludgeon a pig to death - although, bizarrely, once you’ve bludgeoned the pig to death, you must bludgeon the corpse some more to harvest cloth, animal fat and, for entirely unexplained reasons, chicken breasts from it. Doesn’t matter whether you kill pigs, deer or anything else, you always get raw chicken breasts. Tip: do not try to bludgeon a wolf or a bear to death with a rock. That goes about exactly as well as you’d expect.

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Once you’ve bludgeoned enough things with your rock you’ll hopefully have the resources to build a small shelter, a hatchet, a sleeping bag and a campfire, the four essential things you need to start making progress in Rust. When it gets dark, it gets scary, and the monsters come out; you’ll want somewhere safe to hide. Once you’ve got all that in place you can start thinking about the more complex things: homebrew weapons, smelting, some clothes to cover your shame. You’ll start to explore the island, sprinting across the island looking for stuff to scavenge, coming across abandoned buildings with supplies hidden inside. Problem is, though, you’ll also probably run into some other people.

“ Tip: do not try to bludgeon a wolf or a bear to death with a rock.

“Friend! Come over here, friend! I give you money,” he said. I raised my rock suspiciously, but this guy had clothes, and for all I know he’s packing a home-made shotgun. He’s almost certainly got something better than a rock. “Come with me, friend!”

I don’t really have a choice at this point. If I refuse he might pull out a pistol and shoot me. So I go, hoping he might let me stay in his shack for the night. And that’s how I got here, clicking aimlessly on the walls of my cell in the hope that they might break before my hatchet does.

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Hunger striking is going to take ages. I hatch a plan. The next time my captor opens the door I’m standing right beside it, and manage to sprint out with my hatchet raised. Drunk on freedom, I run for the hills into the darkness - he doesn’t seem to be pursuing me. Far off in the distance, as I crest the top of a hill, I see a player-constructed Eye of Sauron - a huge tower that someone has built, crowned with campfires and torches that blaze in the night. At its base is a proper settlement, a village. I imagine I might find help there, rather than crazy hermits with a prison-guard fetish.

On my way there, though, I run into a pack of wolves and they tear me to shreds. Another tip: waving fire at wolves does nothing in Rust. Not yet, anyway. There’s a lot of sophistication to be added to the crafting and game systems in time. For now, though, I’d escaped my makeshift prison only to be literally thrown to the wolves.

I respawn, naked, without any of the things I’d worked for most of the previous day to acquire. But at least I still have my rock.

Keza MacDonald is IGN’s Contributing Editor and has very distinctive hair. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.