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Want to make an enemy for life? Give them Catacombs - it'll have them biting the carpet within minutes.

This text and graphics adventure has a fussy vocabulary, an unsympathetic command analyser, slowish and unhelpful responses and a job-lot of idiosyncrasies.

The plot has you searching catacombs with your companion for ingredients to a magical elixir. You begin by choosing whether you want to play the part of Duke the Warrior or Oswich the Witch.

The top half of the screen showed the first location, with such mindbending images as a brick wall, door, spider's web and lamp. A mangy cat stiffly shuffled across the floor then stopped. The lower half, used for text input and output, told me this was the disused entrance with exists west and south.

Not an auspicious start and I made no further progress, and terminal frustration set in after 20 minutes. Almost everything I tried was met with immensely helpful "That's no good".

W (for west) told me I didn't have a wooden cross. Go west - no good. S (for south) - no good. Go south - aha! I couldn't because the door was sealed. Right, attack door. (It's not here.) At least that made a change from you know what. D received the mind-boggling "None of you has a dead rat". There's nothing like a good adventure for mental stimulation - Catacombs is nothing like a good adventure.