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This is not a game. In Deus Ex Machina, Automata have produced what may well be the first 'computer video'. It comes on two cassettes, one a soundtrack featuring an all-star cast and Mel Croucher's music, the other a program which must be synchronised with the sound cassette.

A countdown is provided on both to get this right. It's all based on a hoary old SF theme, owing more to Huxley's Brave New World than to G. Orwell. In some heavily computerised future all foetuses are nurtured in the test tube. Their life activity is monitored by The Machine, until one day through an accident involving a mouse dropping, a 'defect' is produced, a human who deviates from the biological and cultural norms. The program and script trace the life of this new being, in a computerised rewrite of Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man.

Said life being a rather sad parable. The lesson is that those whom society rejects - the misfits - often develop into people of exceptional talent who are subsequently corrupted by - and promote the values of - the very system that rejected them. Lost innocence is not the most original of themes, but it's still a poignant one.

The cast is impressive, and I particularly liked Frankie Howerd's comic-opera Captain Kong of the Defect Police, Jon Pertwee as the narrator, and Ian Drury as the cheeky cockney Fertiliser are just right. As a bonus we even get extracts from E.P. Thompson's speeches as The Voice of Reason. Mel Croucher's synth-based music is adequately atmospheric, although not of much interest in itself.

As for the graphics, these are very sparse, but encompass a wide range of images. From a screen full of wriggling spermatozoa to the fat Justice trudging self-importantly through decomposing ruins, they chart the progress of a wasted life. At each stage, the illusion is presented of it being a game, and indeed the operator can intervene. Move the cursor over the DNA strangs, and they rotate faster. Rotate the shields about the running solider and keep out the serpents of corrupt temptation and the flames of guilt. The intervention alters the immediate image, but changes not one whit the outcome of the sequence - corruption, senility, death.

This is depressing in its way, but I have no quarrel about that. Some things about reality are depressing and, even in this gimmick-laden computer-world of ours, need not be faced. Automata deserve credit too for their treatment of human sexuality in a field where it has to date been a one hundred percent taboo subject.

But - and it's a large but - I cannot imagine wanting to watch Deus Ex Machina more than twice at the outsite. Really it's a very slight project, and it throws away that little thing which is most valuable about computers - user involvement. One screen of Jet Set Willy is a far richer playing experience.

Neither do I entirely like Automata's moralising. I'd go along with their sentiments on racism and sexism in games for sure, although as far as I can see less than one percent of games are sexist or racist. But it is pretend violence? (To paraphrase the words of the Fertiliser?) Indeed, are killozap games violent at all in the sense of inducing feelings of aggression in the player?

Automata may say yes, but I'm not so sure... So I've decided to look on Deus Ex Machina as an experiment, and if projects like this can push computers and computer games further towards the real world and further towards being a media form, then so much the better. However, in this specific case, with the best of intentions, the goods are simply not delivered.