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Erm, yes, I suppose we'd better admit to first things first. This is a text adventure. Not a sexy Delphine-style adventure with lots of graphics, the occasional arcade sequence and a friendly pull-down menu parser, but your standard old fashioned text adventure with the occasional still screen, lots of writing and, erm, well, that's about it.

Almost ludicrous to expect anyone to pay this sort of premium price for it then, isn't it? Well, yes. And then again no. You see, Demoniak, in its own quiet little way, is actually rather innovative. It's been written by a proper writer for a start - Alan Grant, a mainstay of 2000AD who's handled Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog and others, as well as achieved considerable success in the States with his version of Batman. Grant has thrown in the sort of grotesque, darkly humorous sci-fi/superhero plot readers of his comics would expect, had a good deal of fun with his grossly exaggerated characters and - yes! - actually written some text that's fun to read. Witty, surprising, it's almost an adventure game first.

Grant's only partly the star of Demoniak though. The other is Palace's new Pure Fiction adventure system, which features what appears to be a very clever parser indeed. As the adventure unfolds, it allows you to switch between the main characters (a sort of constantly bickering and mutually suspicious superhero group of the future) and see things from slightly different perspectives - one character will take particular note of a hunky, half alien superhero's laser gun, for instance, while another will be more concerned with his 'tight, oh so tight' jump suit. It's played for laughs, yes, but these different perspectives actually have some bearing on the way the game develops. Certainly, if one of your characters is rude to or snubs another one early in the game, it'll be held against you and you'll find the injured party far less interested in helping you out later on.

Backed up by intro sequences and the occasional still screen in an impressively comic book style (new artist Jo Walker looks like a name to watch) Demoniak deserves to do well. It has to be said though that it's still saddled with lots of text only adventure type problems - the fact that you can find yourself stuck trying to open a certain door for ages, the problems with what vocabulary it'll understand - as well as that (what seems to me at least) rather optimistic price. The next Pure Fiction game will apparently be a very different beast indeed, with a lot more done in terms of graphics, but in the meantime here's an interesting text adventure, well thought out and well written. Whatever next?

A clever parser, interesting text and the odd nice graphics go some way towards reinventing the text adventure. 1 meg only though.