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The noise of the alarm awakens me from my illicit slumber in a janitor's cupboard aboard the space station. Lights are flashing - the station has been programmed to self destruct! There's no time to lose...

As a lowly janitor there's no way I have access to the docking bay and the escape pod - so I'd better try and find someone with an authority card.

Trouble is, there's nobody around. Or rather, there are plenty of bodies around, but only dead ones! I resort to the grisly task of frisking the corpses to try and find what I need.

A rather frantic hunt it is, too, for as soon as the countdown has finished - it's kaboom!!

This is an animated 3D adventure in the style of King's Quest, but with rather more adventure and puzzles.

At the start of the game, two corridors are shown one above the other, with blocking walls, and interconnecting lifts.

The player guides a spritely little fellow around with joystick or mouse.

He can pass either side of obstructions, but will stop when he collides with one unless manoeuvred around it.

If this sounds a bit like an arcade adventure, it is. But very little arcade skill is required, and the puzzles and text input are more typical of a conventional adventure. Most of the graphics occupy the full screen, and many are superbly animated.

The objective of the first stage of the game is to escape the space station before it explodes, and to do this means you have to find an escape pod, and discover how to fly off in it.

This task contains all the pitfalls one would expect in a more conventional text adventure, involving operating the docking bay doors, airlock, and the pod itself.

Then there's always the chance that you may have left a crucial object behind, undiscovered.

At any stage in the game, text commands may be entered, and the responses are shown in text windows superimposed on the graphic screen. A touch on the RETURN key returns the player to mouse/joystick mode.

However, whilst the game can be recommended, there are a couple of rather clumsy features in the way the software operates.

The owner is advised to make a backup copy of each disk before starting out - always a sensible precaution. But the ST disk will not back up using the Diskcopy facility - each file must be laboriously copied manually! And the copy protection method used requires that the original disk be used to start loading the game up! Presumably this has to be a good disk - so why bother will the chore of backing up anyway?

Secondly, the SAVE feature, which requires a separate, pre-formatted disk, takes a bit of getting used to. However, once mastered, it does have the advantage that quite a lengthy comment about the saved popsition can be tagged to identify each of up to twelve save files.

This is a big colourful game, full of sound and action. There's a lot of fun to be had exploring the paths and crevices on the planet that the pod eventually lands on.

Space Quest is an adventure that should satisfy arcade-adventure enthusiasts, at the same time offering an interesting challenge with a difference for enthusiasts of the traditional adventure format.