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You know, it's gonna be a weird sort of a day when you wake up in a graveyard. There you are cold and damp surrounded by swirling mist and mossy gravestones, looking like an extra from a Wacko Jacko video. So you stumble into the nearest town, not knowing what on earth Mrs Fate is going to choose to throw at you next.

Amberstar is a pretty standard role-playing game in which you have to explore the land of Lyramion in search of thirteen pieces of a magic talisman - the amberstar - and defeat the evil Marmion. Along the way you are promised a variety of adventures, puzzles and battles, aided and abetted by the people you manage to recruit on the way.

As you explore each of the towns you discover inns, traders and houses you can enter to search for clues or to buy and sell goods. An automapping function plots out the places you have visited and highlights the key features. However, you can't use the map to move around the town and have to slog it out in 3D mode, bumping into walls and running down dead-ends.

The clues and various other items of booty are scattered all over the place. These are of varying usefulness and you do tend to end up carrying a whole load of useless junk around with you in the vague hope that somehow, someday it might be useful - for example, many of the weapons and spells you pick up can only be used by characters of a certain class.

Once you escape into the country - on the steed you bought earlier from a horse-trader - it's time to stick on the hacking jacket and horned helmet, for lurking in the woods are all kinds of baddies hoping to relieve you of your life. This time you get a bird's eye view of events, so you can watch yourself gallop through the forest, career in the mountains or plop into the deadly sea.

All the characters' functions are controlled either by the mouse, the keyboard or a combination of both and the control-mechanism is reasonably slick. The manual is a bit vague when it comes to the functions the various button icons perform, but you soon get the hang of all the different menu options.

The graphics are good and the sprites are well-drawn, though things tend to get a bit fuzzy in bird's eye mode. One major drawback has to be the amount of disk swapping you have to do, although the game can be installled on a hard drive if your ST has 2.5MBytes of free memory.

Amberstar is a rather old-fashioned RPG which lacks the atmosphere and intensity of Ishar. It's also overpriced at £29.99. Despite this, it's incredibly addictive. With over 150 locations to explore and plenty of chaps to chat to and fight with, this game is going to take you some time to complete, but if you haven't got a hard drive all the disk accessing is likely to drive you bonkers.