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US Gold continue their series of All American adventures with a detective thriller called Masquerade. In it, you play a detective on the trail of a Mr Big. Unfortunately the trail goes dead. Then suddenly your hopes are fired by the discovery of one of his hoods who you trail to a seedy hotel. The adventure begins with you crouched over this crumpled body in his room

Searching the body gives you a new face to evade scrutiny from his colleagues, a mysterious bleeping box, a telegram containing a puzzling message and his "kill anyone, anywhere" business card. In fact, clues that do nothing to solve the mystery but just add more to it.

Your problems develop as you discover a ringing phone, complete with bomb, which is for yooohooo, a zoo populated by a violent guard and psychotic popcorn salesman who shoots you if you don't don't have the money for his popcorn. This is unfortunate since you don't have any money as you gave your last dollar to the guard to let you in.

The game is illustrated beautifully by some superb graphics (similar in style to those in Lucifer's Realm) that can be turned off should you hear any text only fanatics approaching.

Actually solving the game will require some time though. The all-too-brief instruction leaflet provides some clues in its "some of the verbs and nouns you might try" section. This will start you off but beware as it will also guide you to climb over a fence that just happens to be electric.

A good adventure which makes a pleasant change from monster bashing and alien zapping.