Or the further adventures of special agent Rick Hanson. Yes, the title role hero of Robico's earlier game, which I reviewed under its original name Assassin some while back, has returned. This time Rick arrives on a beach in frogman gear with orders to steal the plans of Project Thesius. My review copy lacked the 'dossier' to be sent out to paying customers, so I never really worked out what the plans were for. It didn't really matter, since I had a great time anyway, playing right through the game to successful solution.

Like its predecessor - another other Robico games - the style and construction is well above the standard of the average adventure game released for the Beeb. The text compression has been produced by Midge - the system now marketed by Robico as a utility for other games writers. There are some really interesting puzzles that fans of Rick Hanson's earlier exploits will certainly enjoy. Another agent has gone in ahead and left some extremely cryptic messages lying around. Some of the puzzles are pretty hard, but as usual with Rob O' Leary's games they turn out to be fair and logical - none of the arbitrary 'magical' solutions that feature in so many other games on the market.

I do have one complaint, however. The game has been written in Mode 6 to make it compatible with the Electron. As a BBC owner, I miss the colourful Mode 7 displays that characterise Robico's other games, and of course 7K of text has been sacrificed to the screen memory. Although the text on the screen is extended by the 'exits lie north to a damp cave...' technique, the game is noticeably smaller than Rick Hanson, and Island of Xaan (the monstrous Enthar Seven, of course, was produced by disc access during play). As one about to splash out on a Master BBC, I can't feel too enthusiastic about the (understandable) tendency of software companies to write down to the standards of the most poorly specified machines in order to widen their markets.

This quibble aside, Project Thesius is still an excellent game and no Beeb owning enthusiast of the classic text only adventure form should miss this one from their collection.

Jonathan Evans