Rohrer hopes that crafting recipes will be passed down through generations, with children learning from their parents. If you want to know how smelt steel, or how to make a fire, there’s no way inside the game to see that recipe.' It’s never ‘you need 300 stone plus some amount of wood,’' he says. 'Literally everything is a step-by-step crafting recipe, it’s just a tool used on something else. There’s no system for chronicling recipes in-game, and no way for a new player to know what to do next, save for a note that pops up in the corner of your screen when you’re holding an item that shows you the next baby step up the tech tree (sharp stone + sapling = cut sapling skewer, for example).

Rohrer harvests some reeds and weaves them together in a basket, which I pack with berries for later. To dig up carrots, for example, you bash a round stone against a large rock (there’s no real animations for that) to get a sharp stone, and then click on a carrot plant when holding that rock. You click on an item to pick it up and then click on another object to attempt to combine the two. To get food other than berries you’ll have to use the crafting system. Gratification comes from advancing your little part of this massive world (4 billion tiles by 4 billion tiles) as far as you can, and then starting over in a new spot. Settlements will form as families develop, with the older generation hoping that they’ve left their children with enough resources, and enough wisdom, to survive. The aim is to create a whole civilization from scratch. It will stop at farming carrots, and not ever get to smelting steel,' Rohrer explains. 'If I let my babies die, my camp or whatever I accomplish won’t go any further than that. You might be able to start a modest camp and a small farm, but the only way your creation will live on is through your children, who spawn throughout your lifetime.

In that time you can’t achieve very much. As the name suggests, you live for at most 60 minutes, which takes you up to 60 years old. As creator Jason Rohrer, of The Castle Doctrine, explains to me in our 90-minute playthrough, One Hour One Life is set up to be 'inherently collaborative'. But it’s not just goodwill that motivates them.

One hour one life discord