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Readers of EDGE will be only too aware of the questionable quality of much of the 3DO's software catalogue. But now, with games like The Horde, John Madden Football and Super Wing Commander finding favour, the pendulum finally seems to be swinging Trip Hawkins' way.

At first, Doctor Hauzer - one of the first Japanese-sourced games for the format - seems to be cast in the same mould. It may bear more than a passing resemblance to Alone In The Dark on the PC but, given the excellent of Infogrames' ground-breaking game, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The game takes place in a huge mansion perched high on a cliff overlooking the ocean. You play a detective who's been sent to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a famous archaeologist. The trouble is that someone - or something - doesn't like the idea of you snooping around and has littered the house with traps and puzzles.

Whereas Infogrames' game used polygons to make up the main characters and create lifelike animations, Riverhill have gone one giant leap further and constructed the entire game environment the same way, with all the rooms made out of superbly detailed texture-mapped polygons.

The main advantage of this is that it allows a variety of perspectives to be offered. AITD's biggest problem was that the flip 'camera' system didn't provide much in the way of visual versatility - you'd often find areas of a room where your character was obscured by objects or furniture, and the view couldn't be altered in any way. Happily, Doctor Hauzer doesn't suffer from such a limitation. You can choose from three different views: first-person (through the eyes of the game's hero), third-person (the conventional 'cinematic' view, where you see the character in the scene), and overhead. Although at first these options seem little more than cosmetic, you soon find that they are essential. For example, it's much easier to search objects using the first-person perspective, and safer to jump gaps while using the overhead view. The third-person view offers an adequate combination of the two.

Sadly, there's a downside to all this graphical splendour: speed. There's a distinct lack of it when you enter a room full of objects or a corridor with lots of doorways - especially when you choose the overhead view. But Doctor Hauzer is a slow-paced game anyway. There's no-one to fight and not much to run from; it's just a case of going from room to room solving puzzles.

The puzzles in question range from the blatantly obvious to the incredibly obscure. One requires you to work out how to get across a gaping hole in the floor, while the next has you scratching your head trying to figure out how to move a piece of furniture to a certain part of a room, thereby opening a hidden door concealed behind a painting in another room. But thankfully, no matter how difficult a puzzle is, you're always able to work it out eventually.

Doctor Hauzer's gameplay has a simple, linear structure, designed to allow you access to relevant sections of the house that will provide you with the solution to your next problem. You realise early on in the game that you wouldn't have been 'allowed' into a room if it didn't offer a solution to a problem elsewhere in the house, and this knowledge gives you the determination to persist until you discover something of value. There are a few occasions when a door leads to a bottomless pit or a flooding room, but that doesn't happen very often.

One of the major criticisms levelled at Alone In The Dark was that it was too small. Sadly, Doctor Hauzer suffers from the same 'good while it lasts' syndrome: working out the puzzles and making progress is good fun and generally rewarding, but the game simply doesn't last long enough. In fact, it's easily possible to complete it within a few hours' play - even in its native Japanese-text form. The seven 'save game' positions are partly to blame for this (but having to play the game from the start every time you died would have been even more of a drawback). Riverhill have attempted to add some spice to the later stages of the game by including an impressive animated mine cart scene, but it's a case of too little, too late.

It's a shame Riverhill couldn't have given Doctor Hauzer a little more depth. The game looks fantastic (even if the 3D update is a little jerky) and it sounds even better - from the familiar-sounding intro tune to the actual in-game score, Doctor Hauzer is a musical delight. But there just isn't enough here, gameplay-wise, to satisfy the appetites of most players. If there had been other characters to interact with (or maybe fight against), or simply a bigger house to explore, then Doctor Hauzer would have been an essential purchase. As it is, it's a polished and slick game that is well worth a look, but don't expect it to be sitting inside your 3DO for long.