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Castle Of Dreams is a simplified adventure for children aged 11+. It follows Widgit's usual recipe of excellent graphics and carefully designed input structures in order to be especially suitable for children. Large screen lettering and simplified commands are featured. Thus a single keypress is all that is required to take, swap or leave objects.

The user has to find and burn the casket of evil spells devised by the magician Klingsor. An attractive and detailed colour manual gives a map, and some help, as does Kungry, a character in the story. As in any adventure, objects must be collected, but here, you have to complete certain puzzles in order to get them. Each is an inset arcade game. Two are mazes, one features quick use of tables, and another, the Enchanted Pool, the sort of thinking necessary to solve Rubik's cube but not so hard! The graphics here are really outstanding.

As a result of using the large sized, machine code driven character set, printing to screen is noticeably slow, as is the speed is noticeably slow, as is the speed at which the Spectrum accepts your input. It's very easy to beat it. And I'm not convinced that the intended user will settle for a simplified adventure in place of the real thing.

D.M.