A shocking missive landed on my desk this morning. Written by a ‘concerned gamer’, it informed me that “people are starting to wonder about you guys”. The reason given was that we haven’t taken a look at Tomes of Mephistopheles, a first-person dungeon crawler with randomly generated, Daggerfallesque environments to explore and bombs that can blow holes through walls to create new passages. Although the game is at an early stage of development, currently in alpha, what I have just described is clearly something that I would be interested in. So, as I watched the developer diary below, I started to wonder about myself as well. What kind of a monster am I?

I do like to go adventuring in dark places filled with danger and the improvisation required to press on could be entertaining, but I haven’t had a chance to play the alpha yet and although updates seem to have been fairly frequent, there probably needs to be more content, in terms of loot and enemies, before I’d want to delve deeper and deeper.

So perhaps that’s one reason why we haven’t written any coverage yet. There’s not quite enough there yet and, as always, we’re wary about pointing to a project that requires alpha funding when we have no idea whether it will fulfill at least part of its promise. Maybe we’re also but few men standing against the ever-swelling tide of PC gaming, with titles new and old clamouring for our attention every day. It could be that.

However, isn’t it much more likely that we simply haven’t received the requisite bottle of vintage port, or that the developer isn’t a personal friend of ours? Maybe that’s what people are starting to wonder about. Or maybe it’s worse and rumours have begun to circulate about how we really spend our time.

Can it be true that speculation has already begun that Mr Walker’s visit to America, supposedly to cover the GDC, will actually involve him hitting the campaign trail for one Rick Santorum? No, that’d be crazy. Or that Jim refuses to even consider installing any game on which the lead artist doesn’t have a handsome set of moustaches? Madness.

And it would be downright odd to suggest that rather than covering indie titles I spend my time hurtling along temporal fissures using a device invented by my grandfather that looks like a cross between a brass monocle and a mechanical clock’s innards. The very idea that I’d use such a thing to perform historical heists and live off the ill-gotten proceeds is quite frankly offensive.

All that said, if you’ve been wondering whether Alec spends his weekends attempting to construct an army of robot slaves, that actually is the case.

As for Tomes of Mephistopheles, I’ve got an eye on it. Like the night, I have a thousand.