Ship Simulator 2006

Ten Years Ago, Resident Evil was thrilling dozens of PlayStation owners. The slow but inexorable approach of your undead foes. The claustrophobia as the in-built lag in the control method prevented you from turning around as fast as you liked.

Transform Jill Valentine into the Titanic, flip the zombies into yachts and swap that creepy mansion for the Phi Phi Islands, and you have Ship Simulator 2006. It's by no means the best game in the world, but guiding an unresponsive cargo ship around an oncoming freighter had my head cocked in empathy. As the port sides of the two ships sheared against each other I just enough as to not cause damage, the tension was so much that my legs were wrapped around the monitor.

Anecdote time! After 25 minutes of delicately nudging the Titanic through shallow waters to reach its final destination, some bastard appeared from behind and nudged his anachronistic fibreglass schooner (or something) along my starboard side, causing me to fail the mission. No quick-save. No backtrack. Start again, gently as she goes. This is survival at its most savage.

The other ships aren't technically enemies, but their utter lack of Al and tendency to be where you need to go makes them far more hateful than Sephiroth, Pyramid Head and a dozen Dr Breens put together.

I'm being distracting; this is a proper ship simulator. And within that bracket, it faithfully reproduces long, combatless floating sessions. Even with its isolated moments of zombie-esque terror and hamstrung tension, I'll admit I probably won't be playing this one in my dreams.