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Sherston Software produced a lot of educational games for schools in the Eighties, and Fleet Street Phantom is one of their more engaging titles. It's part simple graphic adventure and part puzzle collection. You are a new reporter at The Daily News, a local newspaper. Your predecessor disappeared in mysterious circumstances, and the other staff are complaining that their work is being deliberately sabotaged. Someone working for The Daily News is trying to bring it down and it's your job to identify the guilty person.

You might think that the scenario a bit, um, heavy for a game aimed at children between 5 and 8 but it actually works surprisingly well. It keeps reminding the player what he is meant to be doing, it offers him only a small number of locations and choices and there's a change of scene every couple of minutes. The puzzles are all newspaper-themed, so the child has to put together a crossword puzzle, match some articles to their respective photos and also put an article into the correct order. Everything is presented in Mode 5 with bright illustrations and short, big text.

Fleet Street Phantom is clearly a game rather than software written to actually teach the child a particular subject. It holds up pretty well by modern day software standards too. The only real problem being that it's the same story every time you play, so once you've played it through once, you've seen all it has to offer.