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"Why don't you go to Hell?" the Editor said to me one afternoon. "Charming," thought I. It was only later that I realised that he wanted me to review Lucifer's Realm, the latest All American Adventure from US Gold.

The story opens with you lying in your hospital bed listening to the doctor tell the nurse that you haven't got long to live! Sure enough, you soon pop off the mortal coil and pay a quick visit to the pearly gates. The emphasis here is on the word quick as St. Peter soon declares that your life has been evil and corrupt [This is why I gave it to GRH to review - Ed] and you depart to the other place.

Wandering around Hell is an interesting experience as not only is it full of boiling lava pits and the like, but also with a collection of some of the world's nastiest ex-people. A notice informs you that Lucifer is having trouble with a certain A. Hitler and that anyone who sorts out his problems will get a ticket back to heaven. Enter one gullible conscript.

All the locations are very well illustrated - each picture loading in from disk - and for once, the pictures do add considerably to the atmosphere. They also contain a variety of clues and you have to examine everything very carefully. The pictures also change. When you first arrive in Hell, you see a small crack in the ground. When you jump up and down, the picture of the crack gets wider allowing you access to the crack.

There aren't that many locations in the game, but you do have to do a lot of backtracking and visiting locations several times. Amongst the characters that I've met so far are John Wilkes Boothe (the man who shot Abraham Lincoln) who shot me, someone called the Reverend Jim who poisoned me, and Adolf Eichmann (the man in charge of the concentration camps) who, after a bit of persuasion, moved out of my way. Other promised characters include Hitler and Mussolini. As you are already dead, you cannot be killed so to speak; you just return to your starting point.

This is a highly original plot, not least because, being in Hell, things are not what they seem to be and you are told that you will have to try some decidedly odd commands. Definitely one that I am dying to play again.