The preamble to this adventure describes how your wife, who having gone to Mexico in search of a fantastic lightning-proof sword, has disappeared - along with an entire planeful of passengers - in the area of the Bermuda triangle. You set out in search of her in a light aircraft and get sucked into a "sort of tunnel", emerging to find yourself sitting by a fountain in a medieval-looking village square. This is where the adventure starts and where you find yourself pitted against a sorcerer. Original? Of course it is! When did you ever play an adventure featuring a lightning-proof sword before?

NO (Never Outside) is an icon-driven adventure with quite the most complex system of icons and command levels that I have seen. A picture of your current location sits at the top of the screen, separated from the text and main icon area by a pull-down menu bar.

As the game starts, a cursor arrow is positioned in the lower area. This can be moved very smoothly and accurately by using the joystick. If the fire button is pressed whilst pointing at an item on the menu bar, a drop down menu appears and remains in view as long as the button is held. Moving the arrow down the menu highlights each option in turn, and you make your selection by releasing the button. The menu bar gives access to directions for movement - as well as help for character attributes, advice, and a map and a photo. Select one of the three characters you have chosen to accompany you.

Below the menu bar there is a description of your current location, to the left of which sits the 'main' icons. Again, the Fire button is used to select. You can choose to move the cursor into the picture area and then scan the picture to describe each visible object in a strip above the menu bar. From these icons you can also list inventory, and another icon is used to display a set of twenty new icons, few of which are self-explanatory. In the main, these give access to a whole range of adventure commands, such as "unlock door", "get" and "sleep". Messages to the player are superimposed over the text area in a scroll-shaped window.

Another fire changes it for a compass. Yet another fire is required to clear the text area to enable the location detail to be read. Between each of these window displays, the whole screen blanks and flickers wildly before redisplaying. It's all a bit messy.

This system probably represents a minor miracle in C64 programming - but it also makes for a game that is extremely complicated and unfriendly to play, a feature not improved by having to swap between six disks sides in a fairly haphazard manner.

Why didn't somebody whisper "text input" into the ears of the people responsible for this monstrous game? Its use might have made it playable. All I could do was to look around a bit before giving up in frustration. The travesty is, the graphics are very effective, and the system itself is quite clever - with a few modifications it might even work on an Amiga!

Well, no doubt text was avoided because this is a French game, and French is a language that doesn't seem to lend itself to easy adventure-type playing. Pity.