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Until now, the Dragon has been more than a little lacking in adventure games, despite the fact that the machine has 32K to play with. But this adventure/graphics quest, Ring Of Darkness from Wintersoft uses up all that memory and more. If you don't understand how that's possible, read on.

Your task is to find Shedir, the Ring of Darkness, hidden somewhere in the enchanted land. This is presented to you as a high-resolution map at the start of the game. It's a land of forests, lakes, rivers and other enchanting features, but also of less-than-enchanting ones such as bandits, dungeons and giant rats.

You name your own character, and you also decide on the various qualities you are going to have. The game plays slightly differently according to your choice.

The fold-out cassette insert gives you all the basic instructions you need, including the fourteen single-key commands, without giving too much away about the adventure itself, which takes up both sides of the cassette and loads in several stages. You are quite rightly advised to have a blank cassette handy to save a game in progress, so you are unlikely to finish it at one sitting, unless you have stamina above and beyond the call of duty.

Even when the game has apparently been loaded, you must keep the cassette in the cassette player, there being a separate 3D maze that you may stumble across at some point of your quest, and as this couldn't be squeezed into the Dragon's available memory, it has to be loaded by itself when needed. This means that when you come out of the maze, dead or alive, the cassette needs rewinding and part of the main program reloading; but this takes very little time and is a small price to pay for the fun of the maze itself. All these instructions for loading and reloading are in the program and are quite easy to follow.

The adventure itself isn't so easy. I began by trying to think up a suitable fantasy-type name for my character, and christened him Godorful. Next I distributed 40 points between the qualities of intelligence, strength and agility, to decide whether he was an elf, a dwarf or a human, and whether his principal skill was that of a thief, a warrior or a wizard. This completed the build-up of the character, and Godorful the wizard elf was born.

Before setting off, you are handed a supply of gold, food and what are called Hit and Experience points. The former measure your mortality when up against bandits and the like; take too long to dispose of your attacker and your Hit points diminish and you die.

Experience points build up as you go, and represent your skill in dealing with some of the problems you'll come across. Your food will last you just 21 days, each movement on the map (controlled by the arrow keys) taking one day. To let you know the size of your task, there are almost 3,000 travel days on the map, on which you appear as a flashing red Z to tell you where you are.

Various interesting landmarks are scattered about the countryside, so naturally you head for one of them. But don't worry, I'm not going to commit the reviewer's mortal sin of giving away too much about the game itself. Only experience will tell you how to deal with the various problems, and when you're killed yet again you'll find yourself muttering, "Now if only I'd had one of those, I could have seen him off. So where do I get one?"

What you ought to know is that some of the landmarks, when approached and entered, turn into separate graphics routines. You therefore have many other places to explore, and you aren't simply moving about the main map the whole time. Some of these locations will even help you solve the problem of your diminishing food supply.

The 3D maze is a welcome inclusion, and shows that the writer, John Humphreys, hasn't stinted on the game's features. The quality and size isn't quite as good as you'd find if it were a complete game in itself, but it is still quite impressive. I wonder if there's more in there than the giant rat that's seen me off twice so far?

To give you some idea of the options you'll have, the commands include Attack, Cast a Spell, Enter, Board a Craft, Inform and Search, Transact, Climb, Steal, Get and Unlock. As the game progresses, you might need to use these in combination, and there is naturally an increasing number of items available to you, such as weapons, spells and so on.

One useful feature the game has is instant reincarnation. Your character, when deceased, will be returned to a different part of the map to start all over again. My own character, Godorful, turned out to be rather appropriately named, and he still hasn't figured out how to cross the river that divides the map in two, or how to cross the lake to discover what's hiding on the island. Perhaps I'll try him again with a few more intelligence points, or turn him into a dwarf warrior and see what happens.

The responses to your keyboard entries are instant, though in certain places the printing doesn't stay on the screen long enough for you to take all your options in. But apart from that, and the typically high Dragon software price, you won't get bored with the game for some time.