For all meat's ubiquity, modern meat production can seem intangible. Thousands of chickens, cows, sheep, pigs and fish are slaughtered every second, but for many of us, this happens behind walls, fences and laws against filming inside slaughterhouses; as such, it can't really be detected in the product that ends up in a supermarket freezer. Relatively few people in affluent countries like the USA or UK are directly involved with the deaths of the creatures they consume, and the process of turning animal corpses into sellable meat is itself a curious kind of "artmaking" that keeps the carnage at a distance. It's the transformation of suffering, mutilated bodies into something shiny, bleached, hairless, predictably proportioned and devoid of signs of trauma, not really "animal tissue" at all.

It's perhaps no surprise, then, that there's a steady appetite for ways of preparing and eating meat that make the act of meat production feel "real" again. These are the varieties of bucolic animal agriculture you see represented on supermarket boxes or labels. Making allowances for cultural differences between Japanese game developers and white English folk like myself, I think Dragon's Dogma 2 is one of many survival games or survival-ish RPGs that channel nostalgia for a quasi-fantastical era when the production of meat was more immediate, "honest" and homely, an opportunity for tribal intimacy around a crackling blaze hung with freshly killed deer. If meat production today relies on separation and alienation - not just from the beasts, but from the often exploited humans who work in slaughterhouses - then escapist fictions like these are both a way of maintaining that distance and symptoms of a desire to overcome it.