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Although it's nothing to do with that Greek twit. Not that we're in any way Homerphobic or anything.

There's a shop just across from the Amiga Power office called Foam Plus, and you can look inside and see that it sells nothing but furniture foam. There are huge blocks of it, sheets of the gnobbly stuff, and even bags of thin strips, for you to stuff cushions or soft toys with. However, and this is the scary thing, it is never open, and the stock has never changed in nearly three years. I firmly believe it's a front for either the CIA, Mossad, or some local narco syndicate. But anyway...

Odyssey then. Our preview a few issues ago revealed that it was written by two Exile fans who, being Exile fans, had sent the game to Audiogenic. A deal was signed and the agreement was that the moment they finished the game, Audiogenic would send them a complete solution to Exile, as even though it's been around for ages, no-one but no-one seems to have managed to get through to the very end of this fiendish, one level masterpiece. Such is the stuff of gaming legends.

Odd then that Odyssey contains little of the same stuff that made Exile great, taking an entirely different approach instead of coming up with a new map or something. Gone is the single level, replaced by islands that can be visited in any order, but not necessarily completed in such a random fashion. Three islands are ringed in the map menu as jump-off points, and unless you complete at least one of these and grab a crystal, you won't get very far on the other levels.

Reminiscent of the crap mid-80's TV series Manimal (a fairly atrocious affair featuring high-budget Simon MacCorkingdale-to-animal transformation effects for the pilot that were then simply reused for anything up to three subsequent series), the crystals in Odyssey let the man change into various animals, enabling him to run across ropes, climb up walls, fly across chasms and leap spiky pits. By building up a magical Ark of crystals, you'll be able to overcome all the puzzles, pits and monsters inhabiting the dungeons and platforms of all the islands, eventually battling your way through to some kind of exciting finale. This much insight you could have gleaned from the preview or the back of the box though...

Because of its platform nature and the way many of the puzzles are set out, it's fairly close at times to the dreadful and unplayable Shadow Of The Beast series, but thankfully it's open-ended, and rarely leaves you completely stuck. Because of the regular hacking and slashing, it's much like Arabian Nights, only at a less frantic and more realistic pace. Indeed, because of its relentlessly platform format, it's easy to compare it to almost every platform game ever, but since this idea's just too awful, I'll press onwards.

The secret to solving adventure games is to work out where the heck the programmers are coming from. Valhalla and the Lord Of Infinity, for example, had me completely stumped until comeone pointed out that it was based on low-quality word games and puns, and only then was its sheer awfulness revealed to me. Flight Of The Amazon Queen, however, is based on running errands and doing favours for people.

Odyssey's formula seems solidly location based. If you find a locked door on a platform, look for a key in the dungeon. If you're in a castle and a bloke demands cash, look for gold outside. Simply finding something and then heading to a new location to use it worked most of the time for me. While in the grand scale of things, this level of puzzles isn't very high, this is a game not a MENSA puzzle, and so fully acceptable.

Obviously, the game would be over too quickly if this is all you had to do, so your way's blocked by what I'll collectively call things. There are little baddies which, like everything else in the game, are gorgeously drawn and animated, with pebbles turning into rockmen and fierce dwarves wobbling around with huge swords. Most of the time they're easy to either kill or avoid, but when they're not, they're just annoying rather than challenging. Hits knock you back into other baddies, or off ledges, and with some of the smaller critturs, the spiders and rockmen, it's hard to hit them at all. And once you've met the baddies, many follow you or fall down onto a lower level, spreading their random arbitary involvement throughout the level.

There's also a brood of human-sized adversaries, with the archers being the meanest. They just stand on ledges and pour down withering barrages of deadly accurate arrows. Unerringly accurate I noticed, as they know where you're going to be even before you do. Magic homing arrows? Still, they're a fun way of stopping your progress as a human (you get offed before you get ten paces) while allowing it as an animal - the grasshopper simply leaps past them.

There are also some bothersome eagles, who have to be fended off by sword swipes. Since they only ever appear in towers or lofty platforms, and since a knock will send you crashing downwards, forcing you to climb up again, I can only assume they were introduced by the programmers as some sort of sick joke.

The traps and puzzles are, like the monsters, a bizarre blend of the clever, the fun, and the downright antagonistic. There's a great Indy Jones type section where, as I ran along a passage, I triggered a series of pads which dropped stones behind me. And then by activating a level to open a trapdoor into a shaft, I set a huge boulder rolling after me, and only by out-pacing this hunk of rolling down, until it dropped down the next shaft, was disaster averted. It was tremendously exciting, but minutes later when I'd been killed just before the next restart point, I was left to kick and push my way through all the rocks from the first set of traps, which then turned out to be impish rockmen. It's all so very nearly right.

On another section, there are three floor switches which fire arrows. It's possible to jump over them, but if you hit one, you go down in a flurry of unavoidable sharp pointy things. Even more ridiculous than this (which does at least give you a chance) are trapdoor levers that trigger arrows into your back. Unbelievable, nearly as unbelievable as leaps of faith. Here. In a game. In the 1990s.

And annoyingly, it's this sort of thing that hides the good stuff and the clever puzzles. Such as the one where you've got to collect wooden planks to make a bridge, and then turn across a rock and roll across it. Or the bits where you have to open pits to trap strangely prescient boulders that come lumbering towards you. Cheers guys.

Or, indeed, the animals themselves. I keep saying "animals" when clearly the rock's a rock, the little green man's a little green man and the grasshopper's an insect, but you know what I mean. They're essential to the game, give rise to some nice little transformation silhouettes, are suitably varied and interesting, and there's not that much more to say about them. The small animals let you go through holes, the birds let you fly over obstacles, the spider lets you cling to surfaces and all the others let you get to a bit of the level that would be inaccessible by a human.

Enjoyment from Odyssey has built up slowly and steadily from playing it loads. I initially despised it, learned to live with all the 'problems' and, by the time I eventually got to grips with all the running around and picking things up, I'd actually learned to love it. But a parting shot - why does this game have lives? It's so difficulty already, and so vast and it's so hugely unlikely that you'll complete it in one go, that adding the further hassle of starting again is completely stupid. If they'd only kept one feature from Exile, it should have been the one where you never died and merely got zapped back to your last position you'd activated your save position beacon.

Uppers: It looks great, the creatures are fun, there isn't any in-game music and, as long as you can get back to the boat, you can save at any time. There's plenty of variation in the scenery, and a fair old bit of variation in the puzzles too.

Downers: A whole encyclopedia of platform problems, from jumps you just can't make, to leaps of faith and monsters at the bottom of stairs that get you before you're on a level with them. The puzzle solving's just a matter of tramping from one location to another, and you're restricted by lives when the game could well do without them entirely.

As an Exile-type game, it misses out most things that made Exile great and completely fails to make the grade. As an entertaining, platform adventure game, it's great fun that just grows and grows on you. Providing you're prepared to forgive and forget the glaring (but mostly small and fiddly) problems with it, that is. I'm teetering on the brink of recommending it wholeheartedly.