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Oh dear. I don't know where to start with this one. It's certainly weird - what else can you say about a game starring a gnome running around inside a walled Victorian garden? - and (erm) original, but actually coming up with any useful criticism is going to be slightly tricky. From the sweeter-than-sweet subject matter, you'd initially think it was aimed at pretty young kids (of a ginger-beer-drinking, Enid Blyton-reading, don't-really-exist-anymore variety), but having played the game I'm not so sure.

I think it's actually more liekly to be appreciated by Fairport Convention-listening middle aged hippie-types (the sort of peole you always imagined playing Speccy text adventures with names like Bulbo And The Lizard King) - them, or simply people with very strange tastes in games indeed.

Let's face it then - most of us simply aren't going to get interested in this at all. For those who are intrigued by the chance to play an animated garden gnome tending to a, well, 'magic' garden though, the story goes something like this: First things first - the whole game is set in said Victorian style walled garden, with a pond, a lawn, a shed, a greenhouse, some flower beds and, um, that's about it.

The only times you ever leave it are for the odd excursion into a tunnel system set underneath - which isn't surprising really, because the plot has it that the character you play, Grobble the gnome, has been trapped in this self-same garden. The only way he can ever leave is by impressing the Gnome King (the giant eye you see at the top of the screen) that he's now a reformed and responsible character, something he does by tidying up and generally keeping in order this rather annoying garden. Annoying? Well, turn your back for a second and roof tiles will fall from the shed, grass will grow, and flowers (!), fish (!!) and naughty gnomes will start running around the place, messing everything up.

Effectively, then, it's a management game, necessitating mucho running about, using of tools (our gnome chum has a coat full of pockets where he keeps a selection of seeds, spades, ladders, keys and other useful objects) and balancing of priorities as our hero battles against the odds to keep the place in order - not unlike a simplified, horticultural Sim City or Utopia, in fact. A percentage bar at the bottom of the screen shows how well you're doing efficiency-wise - if you do everything right the bar fills up and you've finished the game, but if it slips right down to zero the Gnome King will set to frying you with lightning bolts (it's much like the popularity rating thingie in Sim City).

Yes, yes, I'm sure you're asking - but is it any good? Well, I don't really know how to answer this one. Some people seem to have got quite into it ('individual' and 'humorously logical' are words I've heard banded about) but for the life of me I can't really see how - you need a stronger stomach than mine to stand the intrinsic tweeness of the whole exercise for starters, while the sloppy overuse of disk accessing can annoy. For most of us, the basic game idea, strange though it is, could have worked with larger, brighter graphics, an extended game area, a smattering of shoot-'em-up elements and a Codies-style £8.99 price point. (But then it would have been just another Codies game, not this bizarre Holly Hobby thing). As it stands it's simply an oddity, and - for me at any rate - not a particularly entertaining one at that.

Odd garden management game coming across as a sort of twee Sim City (with gnomes). Not exactly a total disaster by any means, but very much a specialist taste.