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Ocean aren't exactly renowned for adventure products, and for them to release a second one following last year's Never Ending Story is significant. Obviously they feel the market exists, since the company is always commercially motivated.

I'm sure you will have worked out yourself who you play; your task is to rescue Esmerelda from the evil Cardinal. To do this you must battle past the guards and the Bishop in Notre Dame, escape through the Paris sewer network, then confront the Cardinal at his mansion and rescue your sweetheart.

The whole product is polished in a way only Ocean could manage. On loading a pleasant, full blown musical piece plays while you read the credits. Then you notice the slick presentation - split screen graphics, good use of colour and a redesigned font.

The graphics system is unusual. An attractive Parisian scene remains on-screen constantly as a background, whilst small pictures of any objects you are holding are printed on top of this together with either an illustration of the current location, or a picture of the humped hero himself. The problem with this overlaying is that the smaller graphics have only thin black borders and tend to merge into the backdrop. Still, you eventually learn to pick out the relevant areas, and what you see is good: high quality and worth the effort, unlike in many adventures. The pics frequently capture cartoon style; a similar atmosphere pervades the whole game.

By keeping the graphics small, there's enough room for reasonably lengthy text. Although this is not particularly descriptive, it provides all the relevant information and is stylish and sometimes witty. I liked the constant references to your character: you stand "in your inimitable way", and can see east and west, "which is pretty impressive considering you've only got one eye." It can be self mocking, and occasionally parodies general adventuring. The balance between text and graphics is just right. Shame the author doesn't know that proper nouns have capital letters.

Gameplay is disappointing. I expected Ocean's technical capability to produce a more sophisticated parser; instead, we have an under fifty verb vocabulary, with no EXAMINE, although fortunately the words understood are listed in the instructions. You are unable to do much.

Not that there seems much to be done. Although I haven't yet made much progress (not least due to the infuriating vocabulary), there are few apparent problems to be solved - certainly this was the case with Never Ending Story. Much of the game would seem to be moving around, and finding a use for the objects. But I will reserve full judgement on this until I at least reach part two.

This adventure is similar in many respects to Ocean's arcade games. It's slick, looks impressive, has pretty graphics, and is technically competent; but underneath the gloss, it lacks substance. This game is thus not for the purist, but occasional adventurers may enjoy it - and that's probably the market Ocean are aiming at.