It's fairly unusual for high-profile games set in the UK to be set outside London. While indie games - such as the Shropshire-set Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and last year's Barnsley-based laughfest Thank Goodness You're Here! - have ventured further north, bigger games haven't tended to stray beyond the M25. Jason says the US is about 40% of the video games market, so it's important to appeal to players there, and there's a "natural tendency" to follow the norms. Being an independent company, he feels, allows Rebellion to do things differently, and Britain offers lots of inspiration for new settings - if you're prepared to look for them. "The UK, I think, to understand certain aspects of our culture, you've got to dig into it a little bit because we tend to understate things quite a lot."

The year is 1962 and you've just woken up in the shadow of the Windscale (now Sellafield) nuclear power station in Cumbria, five years after its catastrophic meltdown. Trapped in the sizeable quarantine zone surrounding the accident site, you must stay alive long enough to figure out how to escape – a task made rather more challenging by the presence of aggressive cultists, irradiated monsters and highly territorial terror bees. Imagine Stalker, but set in northern England, and you're edging towards what Oxford-based developer Rebellion has in store. Fallout may seem like another obvious inspiration for this irradiated game world, but after playing a two-hour demo, it's clear the game draws more from classic British sci-fi. Here you are, stuck in the picturesque Lake District, with its lush woodlands, gurgling rivers and dry-stone walls.