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This text adventure is the latest offering from the pen of Keith Campbell, a man so well-versed in adventuring that he reviews the products of his competitors for another (needless to say inferior) magazine. Does he practise what he preaches?

The program comes excellently documented, complete with paperback book containing instructions and a sci-fi story on which the game is based. The book is essential reading for would-be adventurers, not just to set the scene but even, in one or two cases, to solve puzzles in the game.

Your task is to discover the nature of the 'Dark', an unnatural phenomenon that rises like a vast shadow from the surface of the planet Ithica.

The program is quite friendly, with adequate error-checking and a large vocabulary that nevertheless fails to recognise a number of common commands. Also there is no character interaction as in, say, The Hobbit. In fact, there are hardly any characters at all.

This is not an easy adventure, and success relies heavily on carrying out certain operations in the right order. This order is not always the most logical. There are one or two bugs to be avoided - trying to LOAD TRAILER for example, leads the program to expect an input from the cassette port. Apart from these drawbacks, the game makes for a few hours' good adventuring - and the book's not bad either.