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As a prisoner, you must rescue a fellow inmate from the solitary confinement cell and lead him to safety from Colditz Castle, with the aid of your Spectrum.

There are many pitfalls in this adventure. In fact, you must be extremely careful to make the right moves - a false one and you'll be shot by the Nazis. On the surface, this looks quite realistic. After all, in the real thing you could get very near to escaping and get shot - alternatively, this might happen during your first moves. But it will make a lot of game saving necessary, if you are to piece the puzzle together and form an overall strategy.

Where the realism falls down a bit is exemplified by a little sequence in the parcel sorting office which has a 'wooden planked floor'. This is screaming out for attention, almost literally as it makes a noise when you walk on it. Pass through without solving the problem and a guard will hear you on the way back - fair enough. But it is impossible to examine wood, plank or floor. You have to deduce that you must take a floorboard and it seems the board must be very wide or the room extremely narrow, for the description changes to 'a dirt floor underfoot'. Thus, the guard can no longer hear you walking through.

Colditz has a fast response, even when displaying graphics which accompany some of the 70-odd locations in the game. A split-screen layout is used, showing the picture and/or text description of the location above a length of barbed wire and the scrolling conversation, which includes visible objects, below.

This is a competent adventure which will take some time to complete. I have a feeling that playing might be more enjoyable if those parts of the map that a prisoner is expected to know at the outset were provided with the game. This is an unusual thing to suggest, I know, but strategy could be planned from the start, rather than having to take a hit and miss approach all the way through.

Colditz is for the 48K Spectrum from Phipps Associates, priced at £6.95.