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Reviewing adventure games is never easy. One very rarely has time to finish them by the dead-line and can only get a flavour before having to put pen to paper. You do, however, get time to see how the program reacts both to your imbecilic responses and in terms of pure speed.

This is a text-only adventure entirely in Basic, the explanation for its extremely slow responses which tend to be very frustrating indeed. They might not be too bad if you were allowed to type ahead, but this is not possible either. So you are left to wait and think while the program does its best.

It is also not a large adventure, having only 34 discrete rooms, despite appearing to have more due to dead ends, etc. When this is compared to the Level 9 adventures, also for the BBC, with more than 200 rooms then one has a right to feel somewhat cheated. There is no real help facility - only the shortest of curt messages - and, while there are a lot of objects to manipulate, the room descriptions are very short. The storyline is reasonable but fairly standard and rather humourless. The only instructions you get are on-screen. All told a rather plain program of no particular merit.

D.C.