Don't hold your breath, as this is not the licence of 'Cell Block H'. And sadly, you won't be leading Bea and friends on a mass breakout. Prison, in fact, has very little to do with prisons at all. The scenario is that you've been stranded on a particularly unpleasant planet. It must've been a nasty experience with unleaded fuel, because you need to find some vital engine parts for your spacecraft to ensure your escape.

The hero of the piece is a psychotic Schwarzenegger-type carrying an incongruous-looking backpack. Unfortunately, there are no Youth Hostels on the radioactive horizon and you will no doubt have realised by now, this is an arcade adventure.

The screens of the game are non-scrolling with exits at either side, or back and front, where appropriate. A large portion of the screen is dedicated to various controls. There are two boxes, which represent pockets. Pick up an object and a little piccy will appear indicating its presence on your person. In between your pockets is a glowing triangle, subdivided into three. It represents the quantity of lifeforce you have left (of course, you have three lives).

Just to the right of that is a small orange light. This, believe it, or not, represents your intuition - when you come across a screen with something interesting in it, it lights up. This is rather fortunate, because to search for a location you first have to access an option from a joystick-operated menu, and Prison is a game with a lot of locations to be searched.

There are some nice touches in the objects you can pick up to assist you, like the watch that, if you strap it onto your wrist, will tell you the time as the game clock turns from night to day, darkening and lightning the screens accordingly. For some reason, however, if you find an object with your pockets full, the game won't allow you to pick it up. So you have to wander around with just a single object in case you come across something really useful (though it's possible that this is a program flaw that will be sorted out by the time it reaches you).

There's more to Prison than just this. Sooner or later you'll come across some characters you can interact with. Some you can talk with, but come are just out for a rumble. When they do speak, the words scroll across a bar at the top of the screen and you can select an appropriate response from the options given.

Though there are some nice and imaginative backgrounds in Prison; the train and the nightclub, to mention just two, the characters are more than a little cliched. A reasonably pleasant alien looks like Yoda, the nasty aliens, like Aliens and the droids look like the spit of the droids look the spit of the droids from 'The Black Hole'. Very dull. Combat initially looks promising with your character able to execute a good number of Double Dragon style moves, but loses interest because everything is so easy to defeat. Aliens are very few and far between and, since there's precious little else to do when they're not around, the game is dangerously unbalanced.

Some of the better touches in this game are marred by the gameplay. A little more thought would have raised it above the average. If maze games appeal to you (and they certainly don't to me) this is quite a good one. The puzzles are largely a matter of trial and error rather than brain power and the whole thing could have been made a lot simpler if you'd been given a ball of string.