You haven't died in a videogame till you've died in Casualties: Unknown, a profoundly unwholesome cousin of Spelunky that simulates injury, infection and sensory distress with the same gusto Crusader Kings 3 reserves for papal politics. This is an intricate and imaginative celebration of pain - not just an exacting survival game full of gauges to manage, but a laboratory study of just how many ways an animal body can suffer, before it finally gives up the ghost.

I am one of a million canine hominids, created to undergo spectacular indignities by vicious human scientists, in a universe of suffering that spans several games from developer Orsoniks. I am the sorrowing vat-grown pup of a conclave of star-faring Dr Moreaus. My task is to collect... something, some gadget of great importance, from a cave on a deathly planet, located beneath three kilometres of booby-trapped and infested, poisonous and hateful rock.

Currently, I am trying to burrow into a sealed titanium drop pod with my bare paws, so that I can sleep somewhere warm. Too warm, in fact: the drop pod heaters feel like they were vindictively designed to discourage occupants from lingering, but I'm finding that dehydration is easier to address than hypothermia: there are pools of groundwater around that harbour only a slight risk of "minorly" poisoning my intestines. So into the pod we go. After ripping away a layer of rubber, I smash some glass panes and promptly step in the fragments.

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