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The Noise of angry traffic drifts up from the street below, nearly drowning out the discordant jangling of the phone on your salvage sale desk. You snatch up the handpiece and an unfamiliar voice drills a warning into your ear. It seems a good moment to get some fresh air - but as you hit the sidewalk, a hood with a loud tie and an ever louder .38 pays you more attention than a dime-a-dance girl on a wet Tuesday afternoon...

When you start playing Borrowed Time (with a startling animated title screen) all you know is that you're a third-rate private investigator with the kind of fans that would like to see you in a wooden box.

But you soon realise that Activision's latest offering sets a new standard of quality and entertainment for the discerning adventurer.

The opening location is your office, and from then on it's busy, busy, busy! Every location (and there are many, many of them) has a really good, instantly-drawn graphic, next to which is a panel that gives you a lazy way of inputting the most common commands - by simply using a joystick to 'point' at the verbs, nouns and movements you choose.

Those pictures are crammed with objects and often significant points of detail. Most of them are cleverly animated so that, for example, the water bubbles in the drinks cooler, washing billows on the line, and the newsvendor's dog wags his tail.

One of the really nice things about Borrowed Time is that, once you've dodged into the nearby flophouse to escape the gun-toting pursuer, you can explore plenty of interesting locations and characters in the early stages without too much obstruction - just the way it should be.

Cleverly, you can also enter full sentences in the way more experienced players prefer and the parser will cope with them very well and very quickly. The popular TALK and SAY commands are also available.

The game includes some particularly well thought-out player aids that make Borrowed Time an even greater pleasure to tackle.

For example, you can string directional commands to reach a location several moves away with a single command, such as NNE. Also, you can not only save up to ten identified versions of the game, but there's also a routine that allows you to 'freeze' and 'unfreeze' your status in memory.

You can also use the function keys to repeat an instruction and to issue the commands TELL ME ABOUT, DROP and GET ALL.

The disk includes a 'living tutorial' (a little gem) so that you can learn to make the most of all features, ad to serve as a refresher course in adventuring.

It's not very often that a game of any kind merits unreserved recommendation but Borrowed Time is one of those rare exceptions. It has a strong and entertaining storyline, really excellent graphics, and instant playability.