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Some games are just good-looking, aren't they? They make you want to play them because, when you see a paused screenshot, they seem to look a little bit different to the norm. Elixir's one of those games; it has its own "style" with almost every screen featuring an array of colourful bottles, shelves and the miniaturised hero in his white lab coat looking very studious. Initially quite intriguing, the premise of the game is that Cyril (That's you!) isn't half the man he used to be. No, he hasn't developed a beer belly and started sitting around the house just eating crisps in front of the TV. Rather, he's actually physically shrunk himself and stranded himself in his own chemists' shop. So the quest is on to climb the shelves of one of his walls in an effort to reach, and drink, the elixir of the title because this will restore him to his previous size.

The game starts, unusually for an Electron game, with an actual intro explaining this premise to you, along with an illustration of the shop and some of the problems you can expect to encounter. Although this was ahead of its time, it leaves out too much to be any sort of substitute for the instructions, which further explain the different coloured pills that litter Cyril's workplace. Basically, red and blue are good but any other colour is bad and yellow actually equals instant death. The game's not all about eating pills though - we've got Pac-Man for that! It's a meander through pages and pages of those aforementioned bottles, walking left and right and, when occasion allows it, climbing and descending threads from shelf to shelf. It's also about collecting and using the objects that you find.

Each screen has a nice tidy feel to it and Cyril moves with a smoothly animated, flicker-free shuffle which is quite attractive. Unfortunately, the game itself is unique in a much less attractive sense in that you can only make any progress in it by jumping from flat surface to flat surface, and the physical attributes of the bottles themselves are ignored. Your weight cannot, and will not, affect anything you touch or jump upon and everything apart from Cyril feels like it's nailed in place. For example, one of the very first rooms contains an upside-down toothbrush with a very long handle. You cannot climb or descend the brush, and Cyril stands only a few pixels taller than the toothbrush's head of bristles. And yet you can jump on top of the bristles themselves - and then you can jump from the top bristle to land on the top of a medicine bottle. The bristles are solid rather than flexible, they do not react at all to Cyril's weight and, often, the scale of these "household" objects is really questionable.

Once you've got your head around the whole 'horizontal lines are flat surfaces, no matter what their context' idea of the game, you can start to jump from the top of one "bottle" to another but it's then that you start to encounter the real problem of the game. Firstly, gauging where the platform ends is a pain. You often fall off the edge without meaning to. Secondly, if you do fall off the edge, a terrifying thing occurs. For a few moments you glide and, if you come into contact with terra firma during these moments, you recover. But after that, a panic-stricken look appears on your scientist's face, he flings up his arms and then he starts plummeting directly downwards, right through the shelves which previously supported his weight without any problem. You plunge through screen after screen, and finally end up right at the very bottom. This is as irritating at it is disorientating. When it happens the first time, you mentally resolve to be a lot more careful with platform edges in the future. But, as the entire game involves climbing up the shelves to reach the elixir of the title, you are constantly forced to use the platform edges to do it and the risk of having to retrace your steps for what seems like hours therefore looms large in every decision you make.

Not to mention that you often have to contend with strange things on certain screens too. One screen for example has lipstick that shoots across the screen. It starts off in the top right corner and zips right-to-left, hoping to deal a devastating blow to any unwary chemists. If it doesn't, it moves a quarter of the way down the screen and zips right-to-left again. It continues until it reaches the very bottom and then returns to the top, giving the screen a very dangerous feel indeed. The trouble is that the action - left, right, up, down and jump - is all geared to a relaxed style of play. Cyril doesn't so much move as meander, and so introducing these foes that move at six times his speed is tantamount to handing him a death sentence. And this would be bad enough in itself but what tends to happen is that, to try and avoid taking a bullet, you jump. You then glide as mentioned previously before the whole falling feature kicks in again, leaving you one life down... but now splattered in a heap miles away from where you were!

You can probably start to imagine how frustrating this is. Indeed, it's actually downright bewildering that the uncontrolled fall feature exists at all because it physically makes even less sense than ignoring the physical attributes of the bottles. Just think about it for a moment - if you were shrunk down to the size of a USB stick, you'd be able to walk around on shelves without problem, and if there was an obstacle in your way you'd be able to climb on top of it. Yet, if you lost your balance, you wouldn't fall through the very shelf itself! That just doesn't make any sense. In Elixir, this nonsense not only happens all the time, but it's combined with this odd 'flat surface to flat surface' means of progressing that feels very counter-intuitive too. If I have been shrunk, toothbrush bristles are still flimsy, and a bottle is still a three dimensional object with a neck that my weight would knock over if I leapt onto it and, if the bottle has a lid, I wouldn't be able to walk on its top but through its lid. And yet, in Elixir, that's exactly what you have to do all the time.

The game is actually reasonably large and, if you get yourself a full walkthrough to it, there's quite a lot packed in there. Superficially it's somewhat fetching to look at; the problem is that most people just won't persevere with it long enough to see a lot of what it has to offer. When first released, reaction to it was mooted. Acorn User opined that the game's format felt "old and creaky" whilst A&B Computing somewhat diplomatically called the fall feature "mildly irritating", as opposed to soul-destroying. As far as the Electron version went, this sort of feedback definitely wasn't what Superior was aiming for. It had gone all out on releasing this game for all the different Electron disk systems that existed.

There are official versions of Elixir for the Acorn Plus 3 and Advanced Plus 4 as well as the more prevalent cassette version, and it was re-released on cassette and included on the compilation Play It Again Sam 5, making it pretty easy to track down in one form or another should you want to put yourself to the ultimate endurance test. What's extremely disappointing about the disc versions is that they don't include the animated intro... yet another baffling feature (or lack of it!). If you have the cassette version, you have to wait several minutes for the intro to load even though you would likely forgo it if that meant getting to the game more swiftly. Yet, if you stumped up the extra cash for the disc version, where the load would be practically instantaneous, you can't watch it even if you want to! Mind you, you probably have more chance of going to the moon than finding a copy of the disc versions of Elixir. The negative reaction to the game, the high price of the discs and the difficulty of obtaining them via mail order from Superior/Acornsoft meant 99.9% of users plumped for regular cassette.

Despite the obvious criticisms that can be levelled at this graphic adventure curiosity, I don't think it's all bad. Expect to pay around £2 for the original cassette release, £1-£2 for the re-release (Superior/Blue Ribbon) and £50+ for either of the disk releases (if you're lucky enough to find either of them).