Its crumbling back wall decorated with a lion's atrophied claw is proof of a toppled monarch.
Some were losing their hair and their laurel wreaths, others were riddled with cracks, the terracotta in places crumbling back into clay.
They had looked for years, driving up this road and that road, looking at the cellar holes of houses that had long ago crumbled back to the earth.
At its greatest extent, Ferdinandea had a circumference of over 15,000 feet and an area of about 1 square mile, but as the eruption subsided, it quickly crumbled back into the sea.
It's the usual mix of tense corridor roaming and huge set-piece shoot-outs, with you commanding three AI troops as you move through industrial silos and crumbling back streets.
And just as a path through a mountain is made passable not just by removing the stone but by supporting the mountain from crumbling back in on itself, we know that no barrier will ever truly be removed until a corresponding structure, system or policy has positively taken its place.
But beneath the cosmetics of state building, a nation born just three years ago is crumbling back to a dark past where death, famine and disease rule - and making new generations of bush fighters and refugees.
That said, I do enjoy when my work is evocative of over-the-top-excess and of a certain kind of decay, or culture crumbling back into nature.
While your world crumbles, kick back and enjoy Michael trying to rebuild his.
