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You might not have heard much about it, but it has been incredibly popular in Germany for the last six months. Tony Dillon takes a teary look at one of the most environmentally-aware games ever released.

T he world is not in the best possible condition. This is something we are being made aware of all the time. Charities campaign on every street corner. The homeless surround us. The Ozone layer is rapidly disappearing. I am sorry if I sound a little negative, but I have just been playing Burntime, and the future is so black I am going to have to carry a torch.
Burntime is set after the Nuclear Holocaust has occurred, and you are one of the few survivors. What was once a beautiful place has become a barren wasteland, with small isolated settlements dotted around populated by savages, mutants and bounty hunters. Your aim is a simple one - you have to survive. You need to find enough food and water to stay alive, while keeping your head and your body joined at the neck. You will have to kill most of the people you come across to steal their possessions and even beat the stuffing out of dogs just to give yourself something to eat. I know it sounds disgusting, but hey, it is a wilderness out there.

Actually there is something more to the game than just that. To make your life that little bit more comfortable, you do actually have a firm aim - to rule the world. OK, so that might seem a high sight to set, but then we are all driven by something. Remember, that most of the villages are in fact empty, or only controlled by mutants with food on their mind rather than politics.

If you can seize control of the 38 small towns dotted around, then you automatically gain control of the five large cities, and therefore control the world. It might not sound like a lot, but the programmers behind the game estimate that if you played the game intensely, it would take two weeks start to finish to complete it.

You begin the game in the middle of nowhere, and from here have to create an army of soldiers, doctors and technicians to help you run the world. The soldiers hold fort in the towns for you, as well as aiding you in combat with the wandering enemies.

The doctors keep you fit and well, although you are going to have to go into major cities if you are really close to death, and the technicians will take the odd things you find scattered around to turn them into something more useful, like rat traps or food containers.

To recruit people, you need to stop and chat to them. This is where the more grisly aspects of the miserable future world come into existence. Some people you talk to are not capable of anything more than a couple of grunts, or tell you that they are going to eat you. Others will spill stories of woe and hardship. Occasionally, you will meet someone amenable, but I would not hold my breath. These are just people doing the same thing as you, trying their best to survive in an inhospitable environment.

Playing Burntime could be described as a depressing experience, because it makes you painfully aware of what is happening to the world around us. It is painfully true to life, a lot of research has gone into this game and the programmers have consulted Greenpeace all along the way. I cannot really describe Burntime in a nutshell, except to say that it is a very atmospheric RPG, with a message that really makes you sit back and think.