Glitch

Aside from a few instanced treats that whisk you away for treasure hunts or rudimentary assault courses, early quests tend to be of the "buy a knife and board and then cook three dishes with it" or "fire up a smelter and smelt me 100 of these" variety. They're a way of introducing the game's interactions, from mining to blending smoothies, and even here there's a certain slickness. Highlight that knife and board in the quest text, for example, and you'll be told which in-game vendor type you can buy it from, or you can be whisked to a player-to-player auction in a fresh tab - and the auctions feature pretty speedy delivery.

The game's currency is based on currants, and you can sell just about everything you mine, bake, blend, smelt, or pick from a tree - and there are often co-op bonuses for working with other players when you gather resources, too. Eventually, you'll be able to save up and buy your own house, at which point, you'll want to start filling it with stuff. Nice stuff. Stuff you may have to buy or trade for.

As ever with this kind of thing, there are a couple of meters to keep an eye on as you play. Energy is diminished through interactions, and must be topped up regularly by eating. Mood, meanwhile, and as the name elegantly suggests, is a measure of your happiness. Mood can actually be improved through interactions, and if it drops too low, you'll get less XP and use more energy as you go about your business.

Both mood and energy are refreshed entirely at the end of each in-game day; if you run out of energy, you die, and have to tit around in a genuinely charming vision of purgatory for a while until you come back to life. Seriously, it's practically a documentary. On top of all that, you should also take into account your favour with those eleven giants that have created the world in the first place. Favour can be earned by levelling up or collecting in-game achievements, or you can just donate items to various shrines dotted around the landscape.

It sounds like there's a lot going on for a casual MMO, and, in fact, a nose through the wikis suggest Glitch is going to be a pretty deep game. If you're just starting out, however, you may find the whole thing marked by a certain aimlessness that can be hard to get accustomed to at first.

The landscape is huge, and it's divided into a handful of areas and hundreds of different streets with an extremely slick navigation system in place, but, aside from hunting for the right vendor or looking for the ingredients you need for your next smoothie, there's rarely a sense that you have to be anywhere in particular at any specific time. You're just wandering around, and so is everyone else.

I quite like it - playing Glitch is like being between lessons at a sixth form college, only with a talking rock who wants you to make him a salad every few minutes - but I can see how it would be a bit of a shock if you were coming here from Azeroth.

Glitch players won't be coming from Azeroth for the most part, though. They'll be coming from Facebook, from Flickr, and from Spotify. And if Glitch is currently rather lacking in focus, that may actually be part of the plan. This is very, very early days for the game, and Tiny Speck's model hinges on community interaction when it comes to laying out the future of the entire undertaking.

Players are already working to unlock new locations through street projects, and on a more ad hoc basis there are dozens of odd new traditions - if that's possible - being created by in-game groups and tested out informally every week. Beyond that, if you've chosen to be a subscriber - there are a range of different subscriber options, allowing you things like teleportation tokens and the ability to access special content - you'll also be able to vote on the features you want the dev team to implement next. It should be a great feature by itself - as soon as it's implemented.

Subscriptions aside, Glitch is extremely generous with the content you can access for free, and it's nice to poke around in a world that's so freshly minted - even if a lot of the stuff you're going to find in there won't seem particularly novel. Where's it all headed? I have no idea. Glitch isn't a bad name, as things go - but perhaps, for the time being, they should have called this one 'Limbo'.