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The Hound Of Shadow has arrived - and he brings death and destruction to all who bear his mark. Will you fall prey to his fangs and claws, or defeat that hideous hound of hell?

Before play begins you must create your character. Space is short: suffice to say that you choose sex, nationality and occupation, and decide which skills you will specialise in. Once your character is completed, you go off to a little seance with a friend, who's the same sex as your character and will be around to help you through most of the game.

At the seance you meet several people, some of whom have a greater part in the adventure later. The Adept Karmi conducts the seance, and if you have a smidgen of occult knowledge you soon realise that this Karmi character is a fraud.

Later in the seance, however, there's a weird occurrence that's enough to give anyone the shakes. The Karmi speaks with a woman's voice and glares at everyone at the table.

Finally his gaze falls upon a young gentleman next to you and the Karmi informs him that the Hound of Shadow is upon him and he bears his mark, sorry and all that, nothing personal but there it is.

After the excitement of the seance everyone goes their separate ways and the plot slowly begins to unravel. The early stages of the adventure are very restricted, and you are more or less guided through.

Gradually you start to discover bits of information you can act upon. As time passes, events continue to unfold and, if you waste too much time, you could miss out on the plot altogether.

There is one area in which Hound Of Shadow falls down very badly: parsing. It seems to have a very limited vocabulary and only a vague grasp of the English language (about as little as your average staff writer).

The most irritating thing to encounter in any adventure is the message "You can't do that", and Hound Of Shadow manages to utter that phrase with great regularity, thus spoiling the game and bringing you out of the fantasy world and into the world of man versus machine.

More time should have been spent on the passing of commands to make it friendlier to the adventurer.

You can forget about sound in Hound Of Shadow - there ain't none. Important locations are depicted graphically and are of a generally high quality. Text is, strictly speaking, nothing to do with the graphics of a game, but adventures rely on text to create the world around you. Descriptions here are both lengthy and atmospheric, creating the link between you and the computerised world.

Hound Of Shadow is described by Electronic Arts as a role-playing game, but I would tend to compare it more to an adventure. There are role-playing elements, but most of the game plays like a conventional graphical adventure. What does make it different, however, is the way your character develops as a result of outside influences, such as phobias. Other than its poor parser it's an excellent game that should give you plenty of sleepless nights; when you're not up playing it, it will be on your mind...