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The race is on to produce the first adventure game not requiring any text input from the player. The early contenders are Shadowfire from Beyond and Ice Palace from Creative Sparks.

Your kingdom is in the evil clutches of the Ice Queen whose spell of eternal darkness you alone must break. In order to accomplish this daunting task, you have to collect the seven pieces of the Ice Crown which are hidden, one on each of the levels in the Ice Palace. Not a very original plot but the mechanism of the game more than makes up for that.

The game is played in real time on two different screens. Toggling between screens is done by pressing the space bar. The action screen depicts a map of the level you are on. This consists of a number of hexagonal rooms take rooms and wastelands cannot be crossed; sword rooms contain objects. Firerooms recharge your firestick and ice rooms can be crossed with difficulty - they just waste your time.

Movement around the level is joystick-controlled. Forward moves you forward, left and right rotate you and backwards rotates the rooms around you. One of the problems in the game is that openings and exits do not always line up and so a certain amount of strategic planning is called for as you make your way through the icy wastes.

The Ice Queen is not sitting still whilst you meander casually through her palace. Her assorted minions are let loose on you in an attempt to convert you to evil. Your defences consist of a firestick which you can aim and fire at the nasties. Some can be destroyed, some merely deflected from your path.

At the end of each attack wave, a spinning cylinder appears. If you manage to move into this, your level of goodness increases. You can also move away from evil by letting the ghost of the old King fly over you. One of the clever touches in the game is that, as you move up the various levels, so the number and severity of the nasties increases accordingly. This is obviously a logical defence system, but one scores in so many games where nobody seems to bother if you intrude into their territory.

When you move into a room containing a sword, toggle to the other screen to see what it is that you have found. The adventure screen indicates your status and allows you to perform certain actions.

The bottom half of the adventure screen is divided into two windows. The one on the left contains a list of about thirty different actions which can be selected using the joystick. The right hand window contains the list of objects in your possession.

The commands range from "take" to "put in left pan", whatever that might mean. The objects include a trumpet and an Allen Key as well as the more normal knife and sack. There is also a "help" command which gives cryptic clues should you be totally stuck. One feature on the review model (not to be found in the final version) is a cheat option which allows reviewers a chance to look at higher levels without having to solve all the other puzzles first! Other software houses take note.

There is no scoring as such. You either complete the quest or you don't. You can get killed either by being turned totally to evil or your time runs out. To hep you judge your current situation, the top half of the adventure screens gives you information about how much of the crown yu have found; how much time is left; your balance between good and evil; whether your Firestick needs recharging and whether or not you are under attack.

Many software houses are producing arcade-adventure combinations. This particular hybrid is sufficiently different to make you sit up and take notice. My original view was that having all the commands laid out for you would make this a very easy game but this is not the case. Level one is a nice easy introduction. Level two is fairly straightforward but level three is not solved yet! I dread to think what the other levels might be like and I fear that, in my household at least, the Ice Queen will trump.