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Who are you? That is the intriguing question posed by Activision in their latest game, Mindshadow, and its sister game The Tracer Sanction. They are Activision's first ventures into the field of illustrated text adventures.

You begin on a deserted beach unable to remember a thing and all you have to do is work out your lost identity. This involves getting off your island, travelling to London and Luxembourg and then overcoming your adversary who is determined to stop you. It all makes a pleasant change from having to rescue the princess from the clutches of the evil wizard.

Every location is fully illustrated, the pictures being loaded in from disk. The advantage of this is that the graphics are highly detailed, considerably better than most illustrated adventures. The disadvantage is having to wait for the Commodore disk drive to load in every picture as you retrace your steps. You can however get round this if you know where you are going by typing in a sequence of directions such as N, N, E, E, S.

The pictures have an added function rather than just complementing the text. They contain important extra clues. For example, when you are in the hut, the text tells you what it is made of and what it smells like, but it does not describe the hammock and other objects that you can see in the drawing. You have to find out what these are via the "examine" command.

One grumble here. I tried to examine a stool and was told that I saw nothing special. When I tried to take the stool, I was informed that it did not know what a "stool" was (It was, in fact, a table!)

One command I had not come across before was the "think" command, which takes the form of "think object". The instructions say that you will be amazed at your own progress but I can't say that I had a great deal of success with it. You can also summon help from a laid-back condor who will give you assorted cryptic advice, but you can only use this facility three times.

The games make full use of the function keys which are assigned to assorted commands such as "get all" and "repeat last command". There is also a very useful quicksave/quickload feature which allows you to save your current position before a potentially risky move. This position is overwritten whenever you use it unlike the normal save command where you can save up to ten positions for use at a later date.

The second side of the disk contains a basic guide to solving adventures which is an excellent idea, even if it is marred by the occasional (sic) spelling mistake. There is also a sneak preview of the other adventure in the series.

Mindshadow contains the best graphics by far that I have seen in an adventure game to date. The argument against graphic adventures has always been that they lack the atmosphere that can be created by a page of text.

Whilst it is not even close to being as good a game as, say, Zork, it is a definite pointer to the way games will be progressing in the future.