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The Zyroneans were an advanced pacifist civilisation, until the arrival of Kayleth and his obsessional craving for Chromazin, a rare mineral found insmall quantities on the planet Zyron.

Now, Kayleth rules the Zyron skies with awesome power, using an Atomic Bisembler tosend down his powerful army of androids to enslave the Zyroneans and force them to claw out the subterranean rocks to extract the precious ore.

So the scene is set and your task as a loyal Zyronean is to liberate your beloved planet. The quest and philosophy will be familiar enough to all adventurers though the scenario may seemrather outlandish. This is not surprising, as the adventure stems from the Isaac Asimov science fiction stable.

You begin your ominous undertaking strapped down with metal bands ina cell on a spaceship, and escape is impossible if you don't pull the lever.

This is a superbly constructed text-only adventure involving some truly excellent chaining puzzles. For instance, after examining everything on the ship you should have some tape, a canister, a fuse and some gloves.

Wear the gloves, then unseal thetape and wrap it round the canister. This will now dissolve, leaving Dextra, Masta and Serta cartridges. I'll leave you to think about thatone, as the chain still has a long way to run.

During the course of the adventure you will become acquainted with some peculiar alien creatures and will need to trade with, question or kill some of them.

You will also become involved in a strange piece of self discovery if you gaze into the reflective sheet. It certainly frightened me - though I get the same experience whenever I shave in the morning.

As with all other Adventure Soft adventures which I have seen, Kayleth suffers from a woeful lack of location descriptions, thus paring the atmosphere down to a barely acceptable level.

This stems from the fact that its BBC adventures are converted from other, larger memory, computer versions. It really would pay Adventure Soft to invest in a text compression system such as the Amulet or Shovel 3, as used by Robico and Level 9.

If you can conjure up the images for yourself, enjoy devious puzzles andscience fiction to boot, then this is definitely the adventure for you.

Pendragon