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The Causes Of Chaos is a text adventure with a D&D flavour which can accommodate from one to six players. Or so it is claimed in the instructions, but I'll come to that later...

The loading screen depicts the poor adventurer bound with ropes, and being menaced by some half-clad nasties brandishing evil-looking swords - a picture some of you might recognise from White Dwarf magazine.

Starting on high ground at the head of a waterfall, various objects can be acquired in five nearby locations, which then seem to be a dead-end to the lone adventurer, unless endowed with spiked boots or a suitable key.

Playing as one player, the game performs as a standard text adventure. Entering the fray in company, offers a choice of number of moves from one to nine per turn, asks for the names of all the players, and places them randomly in a suitable start location.

In this mode, when players meet up in the same location they can either help each other or fight to the death - unless one chickens out!

A fight consists of hitting the player's player-number key to strike, on receipt of a report. Unless F1 is pressed, the fight will proceed until one is killed.

Unfortunately, the prompt is fairly quick in appearing, and the instinctive way to play is to continually depress the appropriate button, hoping that your foe misses the prompt more often than yourself.

Worse still, from the point of view of the loser, is that he is out of the game for good. Nice for the rest, but rather boring for the loser who may have to wait three months or so before the others complete the adventure, or decide to restart!

Having sorted out how the multi-player mode works, I decided to settle down as a single player and get into the game.

For some reason I was locked into five locations, yet I hadn't been when playing a two player game.

After QUITting and restarting a few times, I established that there were some steps leading down by the side of a waterfall, but the appropriate text and exit were missing in one-player mode.

The only way round this for a single player seemed to be to start out as two players, and QUIT one of them right at the start.

I wasn't over-impressed with the choice of white as the background colour to the multi-coloured text, finding this gave an excessive amount of glare whatever combinations of colour, contrast and brightness I tried.

But I was impressed by the number of useful abbreviations, such as L for LOOK to redisplay the location, D (object) to drop, and also D for DOWN as a move.

The vocabulary is adequate without being exceptional, and on occasions more than two words can be used. I knocked one point off the vocab rating for not including BOARD as a synonym of ENTER, to get on a boat. Also, my instinct was to type D to go down the hatch, but this merely got me back onto land. I should have used GO or ENTER hatch.

Nevertheless, this is an enjoyable adventure, and quite hard. People new to adventures shouldn't go near this game. They'll risk being put off forever.