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Be honest. Have you ever seen maggots in somebody's mouth? Well, in that case you've yet to see Elvira: Mistress Of The Dark, a fantasy role-playing game in which you help the first lady of heavy metal escape the clutches of her great great grandmother, Emelda.

Emelda is something of an old bat - or an ancient vampire! - depending on how you look at it. She keeps her good looks by drinking blood. She's not fussy about the type, so long as it's someone else's.

Not only that, but she keeps those good looks well defended. Her pad is discreetly situated beneath a warren of chilling catacombs, below a network of dungeons. The dungeons of course have been built beneath a keep and the keep is surrounded by a castle, replete with fully functional moat, guards, the odd maze, a little lycanthropy and about 280lbs worth of perfectly good reason for going and staying on a hunger strike, called the cook.

Right. Now you know where Emelda is, you can nip over there and stamp out the vamp [Or is that "stake" out? - Ed]. The aim of the game is to solve a set of puzzles that reward you with the things you need to destroy Emelda. The puzzles involve exploring the castle and encountering its inhabitants through the game's unconventional but easy-to-use joystick driven interface.

One aspect of the game which you must investigate is magic. Spells have to be prepared from the right ingredients.

Elvira has her pestle and mortar ready in the kitchen and helps you prepare your spells. However, Elvira is scared off near the start of the game by the mad cook. You have to find a way of getting rid of the culinary crackpot before you and Elvira have a hope of getting your act together in the chemistry department.

As you wander around the castle, your new surroundings are updated in the central window, mostly as static screens, though there are some very sophisticated animated sequences. Most of the graphics update quickly in response to your moves in spite of frequent disk access (the game covers five sides of three disks) but it is the nature of games like this to be slow to unfold. It either doesn't bother you or it drives you raving mad.

A disk access loads in all the parameters for a location, so the more you have to do in one place or the more than can happen to you in a given spot, the longer you have to wait for the disk to cough up the code. People who demand instant gratification from their games will take a lot of convincing that Elvira is worth playing for this reason. To each their own but they could be missing out on a large slice of fun.

Those who accept that the game progresses at its own pace will be treated to the gratification that comes from solving some very difficult puzzles and those clever and atmospheric animation sequences I mentioned earlier. These spice up the action no end and are triggered by key conditions - most will catch you unaware, adding to the shock factor.

Unless you've got a brain the size of a planet, and then some, you're going to find the puzzles in Elvira very difficult to solve. If you've never played a role-playing adventure before, Elvira could have you interfacing with your C64 with a sledgehammer.

This game is Hard. You very often have to make the things you need to complete a task - and you have to guess what it is you need to start with, what you can make with it, how you're going to make it and what you're going to do with it when you've made it. Phew! On second thoughts, this game is Very Hard.

Even hardened adventurers will find weeks passing before they even come close to dealing death to Emelda. In fact, Elvira has more in common with old adventure games than more modern role-playing games as far as puzzles go. But that hasn't done it any harm.

An uncommon amount of work and intelligence have gone into the game, with the aim of making it give you the best run for your money. That it does too, but at a price. For one, the player has to try everything he can think of to discover the game's secrets.

This kind of challenge doesn't appeal to everybody. But some people love this sort of complex puzzle game and will spend weeks practically living it. For them, Elvira will be one of their toughest challenges.

Work has already started on Elvira 2 at Flair's Newcastle headquarters. Elvira 2 is a direct descendant of this game and has nothing to do with Microvalue's forthcoming Elvira arcade game (except that it features Elvira).

How the story continues isn't clear but Elvira's next adventure takes place in Hollywood, amid eerie film sets and the surrounding Californian desert. You're accompanied on your new adventure by an ancient native American who can enlist the help of spirits. It's nice to know you'll be getting help, but it's disconcerting to hear that the old man glows when he goes into action.

1. Easy-to-use interface. Once you've mastered it, you can do things very quickly.
2. Really well worked out puzzles for you to figure out.
3. Excellent graphics ported over from an Atari ST.
4. Cinematic animation sequences.
5. A massive game to explore. Highly original plot.
6. Efficient programming keeps disk access down to a minimum.
7. Grisly sense of humour - should appeal to macabre horror fans everywhere!

1. Too hard to recommend for beginners.
2. Inevitably slow and disk only.