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Bob Wade walks up to the Pilgrim one dark and stormy night, to ask him to review The Lurking Horror. "But I've already reviewed it!" croaks the Pilg, terrified at the thought of another long night playing this spine-chilling game, with nothing but the Thing to keep me company...

Yes, dear readers, it turns out that this is one of those famous Pilgrim blunders. I've been so busy playing the game that all thought of reviewing it seems to have been put entirely on one side. Now, as the moon rises over Future Publishing, and the most terrible blasphemies scroll slowly across the flickering screen, I must reveal the hideous, the unspeakable truth...

Let me explain. My name is Frotz, cognominate Dean Jr. I am a student at GUE, the George Underwood Edwards Institute of Technology, where I was studying. Oh, what the heck! I've failed my exams anyway. At the end of last term after a real bender with the boys, I suddenly remembered that I had failed to complete my Classics paper. Twenty pages to write and it was due the very next day... Aaagh! Nothing for it but to head over to the computer lab and get it down on silicon, ready for print out demain matin.

Well, that's how it started. I made my way through the bitterly cold night, trying to ignore the hoots of mirth, drunkenness and debauchery coming from the Dorm, and found myself in the computer room with no-one but some weirdo hacker to keep me company. In fact the whole evening seemed really out-of-order. Perhaps it was the strange disappearances of the last few weeks, or perhaps it was some sixth sense. Boy! How I wish I'd got that essay done sooner!

Sitting at the terminal, something really weird happened. I was editing a text file when suddenly I realised there was a whole load of bumph on the screen that I'd never written. Talk about a corrupted file, this stuff was corruption itself. Whoever designed the character set must have been drinking something really filthy. Although I couldn't make head or tail of it, it seemed to make some awful kind of sense... and, as I gazed at it flickering across the display like the pulsating, nictitating eyelid of some hideously slimy reptile, I fell into some kind of trance found myself in some strange place, crowds of screaming, shoving people, and there there *it* was.

OK, forget the scene setting, but Pilgs should realise that once you reach this point in The Lurking Horror, there's no going back. Providing you succeed in solving the first few simple puzzles of the game, everything I've just described will soon be happening to you!

When you come round from your trance, there's nothing for it but to set oil on an in-depth (and I mean in-depth) exploration of the GUE buildings, and their hideous secrets. The game is a masterpiece of Infocom program design, written by Dave Liebling, author of Starcross, Suspect and co-author of the original Zork trilogy, The Lurking Horror is his best, and certainly one of Infocom's finest adventures to date.

It's good first and foremost because of its authenticity. If you haven't read H P Lovecraft and the Call of Cthulhu, or some of his other works, then you should know that the style of "horror fantasy" is slightly different from the style we nowadays associate with "horror". This isn't a series of blood-curdling episodes in which half-crazed madmen leap out from clothes cupboards and chop you to bits with the bread knife. Nor is it a series of outrageously unbelievable nonsense involving mutant rats, zombies, or other such pulpy rubbish. Horror fantasy of the Lovecraft genre relies on building up an atmosphere of dread, culminating in the confrontation between you and it...

The Lurking Horror manages this atmospheric conjuring trick brilliantly, and does it with a great sense of humour as well (otherwise there would be a danger of the program being insufferably pretentious). Whether you're trying to humour the hacker (a beautifully created cameo character) or wrestling with a Chinese takeaway the humour and ingenuity of the program remains consistently impressive. Finally, as you descend into the darkness below the college, "You can hear in the distance a chittering, scratching sound. The sound is louder now.... It sounds like small animals. Is it rats?"

You bet your sweet sally it is. Frotz old chum... and boy. are you in for it now! For all those interested in experiencing a nightmare you can switch off but which defies you to do so by drawing you further into its web, this game is highly recommended.