We’re all grown-ups here, and this isn’t the first survival game to render both male and female genitalia with surprising detail (thanks for that, Rust). It is, however, as far as I know, the only survival sim in which you tweak the size your character’s personal areas while they hang nailed to a cross, their breasts or scrotum flapping this way and that in the breeze as if being teased by a vacuum cleaner. Half-Life had the train. Oblivion had the sewer exit. Conan Exiles has this POE currency trade .

Like the aforementioned Rust, this is a game about starting out naked and shivering and surviving in a hostile world by manipulating its resources until you live in relative comfort. Unlike most in the survival space, it’s also a game with an enormous fantasy RPG lying beyond the first dozen or so hours spent fashioning sticks and stones into prehistoric tools. An RPG of silly boss fights and quests for ancient artifacts, and one true to Robert E. Howard’s 1930s pulp fiction adventures, the cult 1982 Schwarzenegger movie, and the 2004 Conan tabletop RPG.

By rights the Conan licence ought to give Funcom’s survival game the kind of world-building that the genre generally struggles with, and it’s true to the extent that you feel a greater sense of place and character from the setting and mechanics than you might in, say, Ark. Keen to flex that tabletop muscle too, status effects such as crippling and bleeding colour the combat, often a little too much, while the world map is pure early 20th century exotica, recreating the collective imagination of a time before planet Earth shrunk to a knowable dot.

That world map, a huge swathe of the mythical prehistoric Hyborian age from Howard’s books, is Conan Exiles’ strongest asset, even surpassing the genital physics POE divine orbs for sale . It’s the dangling carrot (the world map, I mean) that keeps you mining rock after rock for ironstone, because you want the iron armour to explore the Unnamed City and vanquish its clicking skeletal horrors.