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Jewels Of Darkness is a three-pack of Level 9's earliest games. Colossal Adventure, Adventure Quest and Dungeon Adventure, once known as The Middle Earth trilogy, are now combined in an enhanced form.

Colossal Adventure is itself a revamped version of the first adventure ever - Crowther and Wood's mainframe Colossal Cave adventure. The Level 9 original added to it a whole new end-game, and now they have added graphics, updated the text, and put the whole thing on their new adventure system.

You start off by a brick well-house, and progress to find a hidden grating leading into the cave itself. In here are the early problems of logic and deduction, which went to make adventure playing such a popular pastime.

The bird that flies away when you try to trap it in the obvious place, a cage planted in a previous location; the serpent or snake that will not allow you to pass until driven off by the bird.

Two mazes in the game may well appear to be one and the same to the unobservant player. One has twisty passages all the same, and the other has twisty passages all different. HAving become known as the 'same' maze and the 'different' maze respectively, both must be mapped if you hope to get anywhere.

Adventure Quest and Dungeon Adventure are both original scenarios, but, with a bit of frictional background, they are connected to form sequels. In Adventure Quest, your task is to defeat the demon Lord Agaliarept. In Dungeon Adventure, the Demon Lord is dead, and it occurs to you that there may be great treasure left unguarded in his dungeon...

For the fast-typing player, who is, perhaps, typing his way back into the game, this means that there is so much activity on the screen at any given time, that the text becomes a little difficult to take in.

The graphics are reasonable, and a little less abstract than Level 9's early graphics, but nevertheless, you are not likely to gasp in astonishment when you see what the inside of the cave looks like, for the first time over! Basic pictures, competently drawn, with rather unnatural colours in most cases, is what you'll get.

Three separate cassettes, or one disk, are contained in Rainbird's sturdy and glossy box, which is attractively illustrated, and a delight to handle, also in the box is a fairly hefty glossy booklet, containing game instructions and a 'novel' based on the games.

If you haven't played the games before, then at £15, Jewel Of Darkness undoubtedly represents excellent value for money, providing you with a well-packaged compilation of three quality adventures, at a mere £5 each.