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I've played a lot of Spectrum games over the years. I was born in the late Seventies and so I spent much of my youth playing the Spectrum conversions of Rainbow Islands and R-Type. Actually, I'll let you into a little secret. In my youth, I thought Spectrum games were a bit crappy. Even when I had the very latest conversion, I always inwardly mocked that low resolution of 256 by 192, the ever-present colour clash and the fact that everything always seemed so rubbish compared to the Amiga version pictured on the inlay. I never really appreciated games for the miniature works of art that many of them were. I just would think the developers had "done the best they could, I suppose".

Fast-forward to 2023 and it's remarkable how my attitude has changed since when I was a teenager. New Spectrum games are genuinely exciting, especially when there's a real buzz around them, as is the case with Seraphima. With a whole load of YouTube videos, gamer reactions and video reviews doing the rounds, plus the fact it comes from the ever-more-impressive Zosya Entertainment, I had a real fear of missing out on something, well, big. And Seraphima really is a big release. In fact, it leaves almost every other graphic adventure platformer I've ever played sitting on the poor substitute bench.

Before I get ahead of myself though, Seraphima is the titular heroine of the game of the same name. The game comes with an atmospheric intro sequence which explains the plot, sort of, but it's not really necessary to pay much attention to it. This is one of those run and gun games, where it's you, Seraphima, up against all manner of underworld marauders. The good thing is that you have two of the most kick-ass guns I've ever seen on the Spectrum. The bad thing is that your enemies have long swords (and some of the animals have long tongues) and you need to keep them at arms length whilst you blast them to bits.

Seraphima is a 128K only game and, after only a few seconds of play, you'll be marvelling at just what is possible when a game is actually designed for this machine, rather than usually being an enhanced version of a 48K Spectrum game. The main character is the most lifelike sprite I have ever seen, with a range of moves that fair boggles the mind. The Spectrum equivalent of Lara Croft, she sports a huge pair of wings on her back, which flutter and breathe even when she is standing still. Her signature pose, which even seems very iconic even in just monochrome 8-bit, is with guns drawn, aimed at the sky. But she can duck, jump, climb ladders, climb ropes, go in and out of doorways and hang from overhead wires.

The nasties that litter the landscape are just as imaginative, with masked ninja-types, trolls and cousins of ED-209 at regular intervals. Each needs to be defeated in a slightly different way, but keeping your distance, ducking and hammering on the fire button will usually result in a satisfying explosion of blood and gore. Speaking of spectacular deaths, these apply equally to your character who can be impaled on spikes or smacked into oblivion with a sword to the head, each of which gives a different animation, followed by a trio of falling feathers signifying it's time to quit or start again from your last checkpoint (a flag).

For ease of control, aesthetic quality and musical accompaniment, it's all damned near perfection. Seraphima reacts instantly to your commands, there's virtually no colour clash and the whole game has such as triple A quality release to it that you probably wouldn't feel robbed if you'd paid a tenner to download it (it's actually free though, in case you're wondering).

With quality oozing out of its every pore, trying to assess Seraphima critically is actually amazingly hard. I did find a few little things irked me. However, before I list them, make sure you understand that these are in the context of possibly the greatest game ever written for the Spectrum. Here we go then.

Firstly, Seraphima stays central on the screen at all times. For the most part, this works fine. However, she's a large sprite, and the platform on which she is standing is usually the only thing we can see underneath her. This means that you cannot play the game as recklessly as you can some others because you have to 'look before you leap'. The game does take account of this and so, if you see the platform comes to an end and you're about to stride into mid-air, you can press the Down control to see a few pixels over the edge - i.e. to check whether there's spikes or safety should you jump off the edge of it. Being gruesomely impaled a few times will quickly get you used to this mechanic, but it is a bit fiddly all the same.

Secondly, Seraphima is one of those games where you must explore to make progress. The game doesn't restrict you to a small area. When it starts you can explore what seems to be like at least 1,000 times the area you can immediately see around you, and unless you've got a photographic memory, you are absolutely going to have to make a map. Yes, a map, with pen and paper, just like we had to in the good old days of Spectrum gaming. And don't think you'll just download one either - the game is far too involved, with doors teleporting you all over the "game world", for you to be deciphering someone else's jottings. This is like The Dark: Lost Pages II, except even bigger, and even more lusciously illustrated.

Thirdly, as you move in and out of locations, the enemies in them reset. This actually came as something of a surprise to me. Most games don't reincarnate the enemies you've already killed because then you know which areas of the game you've already visited (because they're devoid of bad guys). I don't know whether it's irritating or not; the game is clearly designed that way and you're just stuck with this feature. If you're hopelessly lost (and it's very easy to become so if you don't make a map) you can end up playing the same scenes over and over, and dealing with the same villains, searching for that one oh-so-elusive door-that-you-haven't-yet-tried.

Finally, Seraphima moves at two speeds. There's a sort of gentle amble/stroll. And there's a jog, which is about twice as fast. She goes from one to the other after about a second and if you change direction, she remains in that mode. She can jump further in jog mode. However, because there's no game control key to activate jog mode, you sometimes have to position yourself at one end of a platform, run in the direction opposite to where you want to go, wait for jog mode to kick in, then spin round, take a run up to the platform edge, and then jump. This is by design rather than accident, but I really wished I could hit a game control to implement jog mode rather than go through this convoluted process.

Back to the game itself then and, these tiny little niggles aside, there's no denying what an achievement it is. By complicated dithering and, I expect, some even more complicated machine code, I counted around sixteen colours on-screen at once in some sequences. There's sampled sound. There's (non-intrusive and short) cut-scenes. And, do you know what? I've been playing it for two hours straight and I feel like I haven't even scratched the surface. The world of Seraphima is almost its own planet, and there are mysteries hiding around every corner. It's so accomplished it almost makes my brain explode. It's only got 128K to play with - how has Zosya.net squeezed in so many features? And, more importantly, how has it made the whole thing so incredibly atmospheric? Why does it really feel like, as you enter certain areas, day has turned into night? What's the purpose of the giant horse? How many cut-scenes featuring the ghostly apparition can fit in your Spectrum's memory?

Really there is only one game that leaps to my mind to compare this with: Exile on the BBC Micro (the story of a spaceman on a large, forboding planet, and the best BBC game of all time). Seraphima feels like the Spectrum's answer to Exile. And on that note, I'll leave the rest for you to discover. Believe me, if you think most Spectrum games remain a bit crappy, this is one to change your mind.