Instead, it's masturbation fodder, an unashamed invitation to admire a pixel-perfect fantasy figure. It's supposed to be a harrowing moment - a mother who's just lost her son and is now in grave danger, treated with monstrous disdain and the threat of hideous sexual violence. The woman in question is a prisoner, supposedly being tortured. Big, incongruously perfect, brazen breasts, gleaming like oiled whaleskin amidst the blood and grime covering every other surface in the game. The demo goes to great lengths to show a gritty, unpleasant world filled with suffering and dirtiness.

Yet signs of a certain crudity remain, something uncertain and immature lurking underneath the surface confidence and maturity. They've put the time, they've put the money in, and we're probably going to look at Dragon Age 1's muddy surface with a little bit of contempt following this. This is, I suspect, going to be an enormously impressive game on a technical level. Dialogue choices float on the screen like artful subtitles rather than a brutalist box. Visual improvements are useful as well as superficial – the interface and UI is slick and modern, stripped down but smart. Visually, it's a big step up too – the wounds on a newly post-torture Geralt's back were visceral enough to make me grimace, and lupine hints to his face are unmistakable. (They say the increased cutscene count doesn't mean it's going to be one of those games that think they're movies. It's a bigger, bolder game all over – a pre-demo stat-blast revealing that it has 256 cutscenes (160 mins) vs the first's 130 (53 mins), 30 armour types versus 6, 16 game endings versus 3 and, most appealingly, 4 load screens instead of 700.

Where the first game sometimes struggled to reconcile RPG with action, this seems much more confident: a game that knows looking good as men get chopped doesn't mean roleplaying subtlety and intelligence has been overlooked. Magic assassin-ninja-superdude Geralt and his world are solid and physical, moving with dynamism and variety rather than the light looping of before. At least the world of this game would mirror my own condition.

Better to carry on, and to my next appointment. He would have his minders throw in the Rein on sight. Perhaps he could spare me a promotional t-shirt to cover my filthy body? But not. I thought of Quintin, and his shoes made of finest unicorn hide. The guards had turned me away when I'd tried to enter through the main doors - disgusted by the foul breath that had resulted from eating a sleeping tramp's shoes and by the rotting pigeon-skin loincloth I had been forced to don once I'd sold my last clothes to afford a cup of frightening grey coffee. It took me eight straight hours to crawl through the sewers, beneath Cologne's conference centre and then up through an impossibly tight U-bend into a disused toilet somewhere in the North Hall, but finally I was back at GamesCom.

Muddy heights 2 demo