“I really had a creative awakening working at that studio – whose strengths were definitely more story and creative.

“Working at Arkane changed me completely,” he says. Though most famous now for its meaty stealth-action adventure Dishonored, in the summer of 2007, his team was working in secret on a never-to-be-finished episode of the grandaddy of dystopian sci-fi, Half-Life – a contract job for the now world-bestriding Valve Corporation. Not a surprise considering Provost’s past, which includes a formative stint at French developer Arkane Studios. We’re not a black and white studio – or at least we’ve tried not to be. I don’t try to make a big moral, social, ‘Oh you shouldn’t take drugs’ statement, because I think the reality is much less clear and that makes that topic a lot more interesting to me. “And that plays into a lot of social trends that are quite current. “The basis of what I see as dystopia is the idea that people think that the society is actually utopian whereas the reality of it underneath the hood is a lot darker,” he says. Provost is clearly trying to say something about us, and none of it good. Released this week via Steam Early Access and Xbox One Preview, We Happy Few oozes menace, bringing every one of those ingredients to an alt-history 1960s Britain where post-war survivors in the fictional town of Wellington Wells treat their crazy with daily applications of a government-supplied drug called “Joy.” You play as hapless everyman, Arthur Hastings, who spends his days redacting old newspaper headlines and who, after skipping his dose, begins to see the world as it really is – a dystopian nightmare where happiness and hell go hand in hand. Ask Guillaume Provost, the game’s producer and founder of the Montreal-based studio, to name the rest of the ingredients that went into the pot and you get a list that pretty much defines bleak, but brilliant, meditations on totalitarianism – Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, V for Vendetta, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World. To others, exactly the kind of rousing hooey that leads young men to their doom on far-flung battlefields. It is, to a certain kind of misty-eyed “Brexit” patriot, the very stuff of Englishness. Take the game’s title – a reference to the most famous speech in Shakespeare’s Henry V. With Compulsion Games’ eye-catching We Happy Few, you might settle for it being the sum of them. The hope with most games set in dystopian worlds is that they quickly transcend their more obvious influences.

We happy few has it cracked