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Bubbles are definitely in at the moment. No sooner have we had Firebird's excellent Bubble Bobble then Infogrames chip in with Bubble Ghost.

Luckily the two games have very little in common, except that they both have the word 'bubble' in their title and are both fun to play.

In fact, Bubble Ghost features one ghost, namely you, and one bubble. The bubble in question is your soul, which has unfortunately been separated from your body, if you can call it that. Your soul is so light and fragile that it has taken on the appearance of a bubble and, as bubbles do, it will bursh when prodded, or even touched, by anything sharp.

The scene is a giant old castle, decked out with the latest in surrealist high-tech equipment bristling with sharp edges. Unlike your soul, you can move through any of the objects in the castle's rooms without danger. The only way you can be reunited with your soul is to blow the bubble out of the castle, by guiding it past all the nasty bits in each of the many rooms.

Each room is seen from the side, the graphics being simple but effective for this type of game. The rooms are variously decked out with futuristic looking heads, pointed lances that go in and out of the walls, and crystals (sharped-edge of course) that pulsate, growing and then shrinking, inviting you to try and pass them before they grow again.

Many of the hazards can be removed by cunningly blowing in the right place. Take fans, for example. These have an annoying tendency of blowing your bubble off course, invariably into something pointed. A quick puff on a fan's power pack will take the wind out of its sails for good, allowing you to pass safely.

Other 'blowable' hazards include trumpets and candles. Wherever you find a trumpet, there's a fair chance that the room contains a seemingly impassable object or hazard. By 'blowing your own trumpet' the chances are that you can remove the hazard leaving you free to exit the room.

As you get deeper into the castle, better timing and optimal reactions are required to negotiate paths with narrower, more and more objects, hazards and simple logic problems.

Although control is a mixture of motion and keyboard, the combination works very well here. What you do is move the ghost round the room with your mouse, using the left and right buttons to rotate it either clockwise or anti-clockwise. Being a ghost, you are impervious to all the sharp edges which are so damaging to the bubble, so you can move freely, passing through objects and hazards in true ghostlike fashion.

To blow the bubble, you simply position the ghost alongside it and press the Shift button. The bubble will then be blown away from the ghost. Thus, if you want to blow the bubble up, you must position the ghost below it, pointing upwards before blowing.

The jelly-like animation of the bubble, as it floats across the screen, is superb, and when it pops it actually looks like a bursting bubble. The ghost character is equally impressive, especially immediately following the loss of a bubble when it frowns and puts its hands on its hips accusingly, as if to say "You careless wally!"

The general room graphics are good but not stunning, but the sound effects are definitely above average for the ST. A status line along the bottom of the screen shows your score, lives remaining, room number and high score.

One final point of interest about this game is its apparent popularity with women. For whatever reason, Bubble Ghost seems to appeal to female gamers. I'm not suggesting for one minute that games should be tailored to the tastes of one sex or the other, but it is nice to see a game that has no violence or death and yet is still fun to play. Sadly most games, programmed and/or released in the UK, don't fall into this category because it's not what the predominantly male market wants, or are conditioned to want by TV and the major software publishers.

Anyway, although simple, Bubble Ghost is one of those games that doesn't necessarily need blood, bombs or mega graphics to make it work. Fluid gameplay and ease of control make this one addictive and fun-to-play, although the £19.95 price tag is a bit on the steep side.