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The vine of life stretches long and far before you, oh withered one, but before you reach the Final Enlightenment on The Golden Path it will have been slashed by monsters and the grapes soured by the complex puzzles that face you.

You are the newly initiated monk Y' in Hsi, whose father, the Emperor Tang Yin, was murdered by an evil warlord. Before he died he gave you a ring, containing his magical life force, and a scroll called The Book of Knowledge. Combined with your monkish command of the martial arts and help from a friendly hedgehog called Norman you're all set for the long road.

Despite Firebird's claim of complex puzzles, the action - set against highly detailed but gaudy backgrounds - takes the form of bashing brainless animals and defending yourself against sudden goblin attacks. The goblins - monkey-faced midgets in baggy trousers - have an aversion to hedgehogs so, if you can catch him, Norm comes in handy on the first screens. You have to hold him in your hands though, because the pocket in your robe, which holds one object, won't take the prickly bundle and that's trouble when you want to pick up one of the other objects on the trail in a hurry.

The puzzles are easily solved but made artificially more difficult when the scenes are switched around on the game map. The rosy apple may be on one screen and the hills with the hungry old man on the one to the right. It's easy enough to drop the apple at the old man's feet and wait for your reward. When you reload the game, the old man and his hill may be replaced by a next-to-naked hill man who's after your blood, you'll have to store that apple in your pocket in the hope that you'll stumble upon the old man fairly soon.

Combat encounters take you further along to Path but drain the energy from your life vine. If that shrivels, you've had it. The only way to increase vine power is to solve some puzzles and that means finding the use for the fire tongs in the temple, finding a way to ford a sacred river and find the stick of yellow incense. Once you know which object and character goes together, there's not much more to do, apart from searching around screens from the randomly placed objects every time you load the game.

The Golden Path is a superb package game with graphics and oriental souondtrack worthy of the ST combined with a 34-page mystic novella and two discs - one for the monk's attributes and the other for the backgrounds. The gameplay, however, is disappointingly similar to the fighting fist mould of games and the puzzles are not strong enough to bless the game with full-fledged adventure status. If Firebird had paid as much attention to plot as it has to graphics and sound, the game might have been a success.