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Guardians. How to explain it? Ignore the ridiculous plot and take notes, we'll be asking questions later.

What you've got is a three-dimensional room, over the front of which is a partial covering. A ball is set in motion in the room and it bounces around, rebounding off the walls and the partial covering. Meanwhile, on the right, coloured squares drop down a chute, stay for a while at the bottom, then toggle off again. If you pick these squares up with the mouse you can drop them into the vacant places on the covering, where they can still be moved around. However, squares of the same colour in groups of four, six or nine fuse together and become part of the solid barrier. Got it so far?

There are three goals to each level. First, to stop the ball leaving the room by covering as much of the opening as possible. Your time limit is decreased considerably every time the ball escapes. Second, to collect the bonuses that appear randomly on parts of the screen. If not collected, these have an adverse effect on you: decreasing your score, changing the cursor controls and so on. Third, to build up enough ot a score before your time limit runs out to get to the next level. As the levels progress, more balls appear (up to three at a time), the falling colours become more unfriendly and the necessary score increases.

As is usual with Loricial games, sound is the most outstanding attribute - sampled music you can quite easily listen to for half an hour being played throughout. The graphics haven't been neglected either; there's lot of detail to distract you from the task in hand.

Guardians is weirdly fun. French software houses don't half come up with some strange concepts, but they're welcome departures from the usual round of monster-bashing and great fun for getting your mind around for half an hour or so. The game does pall after a while, but then you wouldn't expect to be playing it for hours on end. Get someone else to buy it for you and waste some time the fun way.

1. Same sort of "simple but fun" concept as Loriciel's other games, Disc and Quadrel.