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Who wants to live forever? Mordamir the wizard does, and he's already got three centuries' practice in, but immortality's no fun if you have to spend eternity in a dungeon. Andrew 'Sorcerer's Appentice' Hutchinson dons his mystic robes and flies to the rescue...

Mordamir, Wizard of the Crimson Keep, has gone and got himself in a spot of bother. It seems he's imprisoned in the ancient city of Erinoch, in a labyrinth he was exploring, and now he's called to you in your dreams to come and rescue him. No small task for a mere apprentice who'd rather be down at the Frog's Spittle Inn getting stuck into a mug of mead!

Your objective in The Immortal, a dungeons and incredibly weird creatures game set in a seven-level labyrinth, is to make your way down to the bottom level (where your mentor Mordamir happens to be). To get there, you must solve innumerable puzzles and tackle more ugly creatures than you'd find at a Bros concert.

You control your on-screen self entirely with the joystick. Hit the spacebar and you call up an inventory of your earthly goods and chattels: apart from that, almost everything else is automatic and the keyboard is largely redundant. When you encounter one of the many aggressive creatures in the dungeon you automatically enter fight mode. Move the joystick forward to jab, back and then forward to slash, and left or right to parry in the corresponding direction. To kill your opponent you need to slash him just before he slashes you - in other words, when his defences are down.

Along the way you find a handful of spells on each level to use on the labyrinth dwellers, but you must activate these before your character enters fight mode. For example, the second goblin you meet on the first level of the game must be dispatched by means of a fireball. Read the spell before you enter the room he is in, and then simply click the Fire button to send a ball of flame hurtling towards his dangly bits.

Besides fighting goblins and trolls, you must chart your way around a veritable forest of traps. The most common is a simple pit, and if you fall into one of these you pull yourself out by swinging back and forth on your staff - that is unless your staff breaks, in which case you end up with a serious case of legs-up-the-bottom-itus.

Complete a level and the computer flashes a certificate number on the screen, enabling you to start next time from the later dungeons. There is however no save game option, so you have no choice but to complete an entire level at one sitting.

Attention to detail and atmospheric graphics effects are what make The Immortal so enjoyable: torches, for example, flicker and illuminate sections of the wall in the background.

You get an aerial three-quarter view of the rooms, so you can see not just the room you're in but also about half of the next one. Where this game really leaves the field standing though is in the animation department.

Your character walks smoothly at a realistic pace around the dungeon while his staff sways and his robes glisten. When he's fighting, all the movements are smoothly choreographed, and when he draws blood there's a satisfying gruesome spurt of red.

Only the sound is disappointing: it's just a series of internally generated tunes which tend to grate on the nerves after a while. With a megabyte of memory to play with, it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect sampled sound effects. Still, that's the way it is, and if it's sound you're into, this isn't the best place to go.

The subject matter of The Immortal is far from original, and the storyline reads like a mishmash of a dozen role-playing games, but the result is extremely playable and eminently watchable.

The problems are pitched at just the right level of difficulty - there's always light at the end of the tunnel - and they crop up in twos or threes, so you can go off and solve something else and then come back to any deferred puzzles.

The Immortal would make a welcome addition to any dungeon-loving, problem-solving ST gamer's library - that is, just as long as you've got a 1MByte machine!