"The broad walked into the room and looked me up and down. She had legs that wouldn't quit and a smile you could feel in your hip pocket. My palms got sweaty and a voice in my head was telling me that she'd killed him. I ignored the voice, she couldn't have done it, because, as I knew only too well, dead men are heavier than broken hearts."

Raymond Chandler's novels were turned into some of the most enduring films of the 1940s. His smooth-talking, hardboiled, wise-cracking heroes remain as popular today as they were 50 years ago, so the use of a Raymond Chandler character in an adventure game was always inevitable.

Dead End is based on the 1944 RKO film, Farewell My Lovely. The adventure starts with you sitting in your office in Los Angeles in the year 1941. A man called Alverson drops by and asks you to investigate the death of his friend Miles Dunbar. Mr Dunbar was found face down in the pacific with a glazed expression on his face. You assume the role of Phillip Marlowe, private detective, and your job is to find out 'whodunnit' and why.

Having investigated the office, you pull on your jacket, push your hat squarely onto your head and get into your car. Problem number one: you don't know where to go. A quick inventory check and you realise you haven't really looked very hard at the photograph that Mr Alverson gave you. Ink on your hands leads you to conclude that there's writing on the back. Sure enough, there's a scribbled address - 217 Bluehills.

This turns out to be the home of Miles Dunbar's widow and there are enough clues in the house to set you off on the right track.

Dead End is a graphic and text adventure. If the graphics look moody, that's because they're actually digitised stills from the original film starring Disk Powell. These appear on most screens and add to the seedy, low-key 1940s ambiance.

The parser (the interface between you and the computer) enables you to construct relatively long sentences built up with the use of a comma. The words "it" and "then" can also be used, so by most standards the game is quite intelligent.

The text descriptions are excellent, closely following the gritty Chandleresque style. You even find you're quivering your top lip and putting on a ridiculously bad Humphrey Bogart accent as you read the text descriptions. The whole atmosphere of the game is very evocative indeed.

The problems are taxing, but not ridiculously difficult. Occasionally the game lapses into that age old struggle of just getting your message across to the computer; it's often more a case of trying to come up with the right phrase rather than the right solution. But if you're a film noir fan, have murky lighting in your bedroom and miss those days when men were sharp and dames were dangerous, get your shabby raincoat out of the cupboard, load up Dead End and start wisecracking with the best of them.