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Karos is a magical island, supposedly in some parallel universe, which you enter through a stone gateway at the start of this adventure. Beyond the gate you find a world that slowly but steadily becomes increasingly real, fascinating and tantalising as you explore it. You can't return through the gate until you obtain the mysterious Talisman of Khoronz - a task that took me four evenings, even with the help of the hints booklet.

Acornsoft has fed the large and growing number of us BBC Micro owner adventure addicts with a steady supply of reasonably original adventures since the machine was launched. Karos comes from a new author, and is by far the best from Acornsoft to date. It leaves the majority of the competition some way behind, not through any great technical sophistication, but by virtue of its design.

The atmosphere is as consistent and convincing as in any adventure I've played, including the Level 9 or Infocom classics. Derek Haslam clearly has a great gift for building up a world in the player's imagination.

Whether Karos is a classic in its own right I am not so sure. The beautiful atmosphere and perfectly tuned problems, slowly increasing in complexity as the game progresses, are unfortunately tied to a very limited and wooden parser. In non-technical language, the adventure only understands a few verbs beyond the usual take, drop and compass directions. Not only that, it often misunderstands very simple modifications of commands. There's always a trade-off between the size of an adventure, the size of its vocabulary and the intelligence of its parser, but Karos definitely errs on the side of neglecting the player's convenience. In particular, ENTER and EXIT are understood very inconsistently, being compulsory for shops but useless in several caves. TURN OFF LAMP does not work, but SWITCH OFF LAMP does! There are a couple of bugs associated with the handling of objects, and don't press CTRL-V while you're playing - the BBC will switch mode, wiping out your adventure. This kind of crash-proofing should be standard on professional games.

If you're bored with the slow responses of Acornsoft's earlier Basic-driven adventures you'll be pleased to know that Karos is machine code driven. In other respects Karos lacks some technical polish - e.g. the routine for unwrapping the compressed text occasionally inserts extra spaces before commas and full stops or leaves them out. Such problems are perhaps not worth bothering about in an adventure that has so much else to recommend it, but a really polished 'front end' would have made all the difference.

On the plus side, colour is used in an original and constructive way, and the game's tour de force is keeping track of the player's bank balance, even with three different types of coins.

Despite these reservations this is a superbly designed adventure. The atmosphere steadily captures the imagination, drawing you into the web of conundrums that lead you to the two greatest treasures of Khoronz the Wizard, and back through the gate.

On the way there are some delightful discoveries: a secret valley, redolent of mystery and magic; a fishing village with talkative inhabitants; mines and mountains, forest and wilderness; several mazes (not too difficult); and my favourite, a sea voyage right round the island - once you have enough wisdom to ignore the old sailor's advice! It's quite superb, being simultaneously a maze, a route to offshore islets that are otherwise inaccessible, an unexpected second route into the endgame in Khoronz's lair beneath the volcano and an invaluable source of information about the coastline of Karos itself.

Gateway To Karos is an adventure for everyone. It is traditional stuff, magic, caverns, dragons and all, but exceptional in quality. Old hands will want it for their collections. Beginners could do worse than start here. The hints booklet will help you out if you're stuck, though it's best kept for emergencies: it's worth savouring this gem of an adventure.