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It's no joke being a Wally. You get these strange nightmares, you see - about being unable to wake up to go to work and being trapped in a house where everything has grown to an enormous size. Either that, or you've been shrunk. Whichever - it still means you are in for a hard time!

Pyjamarama must be Mikro-Gen's best game so far. The graphics are great and the playability unquestioned. You take on the role of Wally Week, the hero of several Mikro-Gen games.

This time Wally is fast asleep and dreaming horrible dreams. Your job, as Wally's miniaturised spririt form, is to take him up in time for work. To do this, you must find Wally's alarm clock and wind it up. Easy, eh? No!

You have to travel around a maze of beautifully drawn rooms full of strange hazards - like snapping scissors and roast chickens out for vengeance on the person who stuffed them. It would be unfair to compare this game to Jet Set Willy - but as people will inevitably do this, I'd like to say I think it is better.

Wally moves about his nightmare world collecting - and dropping - objects. Just as in an adventure, he needs certain objects at certain times to complete the various tasks he needs to complete before reaching the final goal - waking the deeply sleeping real Wally up in time for work.

In many cases, you'll need to collect one object in order to succeed in picking up another - and Wally's spirit form can only carry two things at a time. To swap objects, Wally simply moves over the one he wants - and the one he drops is left behind. Getting exactly the right combination will take some time - longer than I had to get this review to you, that's for sure!

There are many rooms in the house - my favourite is the video games room. Enter it and you are confronted with a bunch of hostile scissors which descend from the ceiling space, invader-style. Wally can blast them. If he gets all the scissors, some more roast chickens - or are they turkeys? - appear to plague him.

At the top of the screen there's a glass of milk which displays your snooze energy. You can replenish the glass by picking up items of food which appear at various places around Wally's dream house.

You get three lives to play with. Use them all up and you get an encouraging message from the management plus a percentage score and the number of paces Wally has walked.

Pyjamarama is a little gem which will keep you amused for weeks if not months. Here at C&VG we liked it so much that we're sticking it in our Hall of Fame. Make sure Santa sticks one in your stocking this Christmas!