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Psytronik Software has an extremely large catalogue of games for sale, and Soulless is one of its more recent. According to the premise, your crime was to call for a pacifist society and, as a result, you were captured, turned into a beast, had your soul stolen and your enemies locked you in a tomb for a thousand years. Nice.

Soulless begins with a graphical demo showing this entire story, complete with an explosion of amazing C64 music. This is promising stuff on such a dated machine, and the care and attention lavished on the programming, graphics and music is similarly breath-taking. A development team of three big C64 names (Georg Rottensteiner, Trevor Storey and Mikkel Hastrup) is responsible. You'd wonder what could go wrong?

From this promising beginning however, I found Soulless the game to commit the sin of being rather run-of-the-mill graphical adventuring. Its main failing is that, although it includes a "massive map to explore", progress through the rooms is linear; you're not "free", a la Jet Set Willy, to decide which room to visit next. Instead each game becomes a tiring trek through the same rooms in the same order, and it's easy to collide with the roaming nasties and be sent all the way back to room one. After only a few goes I became quite dispirited, and was heading back to Flagon Bird.