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No points for guessing this game is set in Australia - because it's not. No, this is a murder story set in an unlikely town called St Etienne, somewhere in France. A man lies sprawled out on the pavement with a bullet through his head. The bullet came from a fourth-floor window across the street.

The stiff (sorry, victim) in question is James Sydney, a married man with two children. There's no apparent reason why he should have turned into a crime statistic. He wasn't a drugs peddler, or an international terrorist, or a Price is Right winner.

Your job as a detective sergeant in the St Etienne Crime Squad is to crack the case. All those evenings watching Hill Street Blues and Dempsey and Makepeace haven't been wasted. If a vacant-brained Yank like Dempsey can sniff out criminals (he usually shoots them) so can you.

Before proceeding to the scene of the crime, I must tell you that this game was written by Gilles Blancon. Big deal, you say. Well, Gilles est un cop francais, whether he's a PC Ploddeur or one of the dirty raincoat Surete mob, I don't know. All I know is that Gilles knows a lot about murdeur, as it's known in France. Back to the supine victim (sorry, stiff).

The game loads in two sections. In the first, you must visit two locations and take photographs. Sheer brainpower leads you to the scene of the crime itself, graphically depicted in a window on-screen.

The cursor keys let you move to the spot to be photographed. Pressing F7 zooms in on the spot, displays the enlarged view in the window below and puts up notes on the notepad to the right.

Sounds simple, but that only happens if you choose a spot that's got something interesting in it. Most of the time you press F7 and nothing happens. The may lead you to believe that the software doesn't work. This is not true, you just didn't know where to look.

Take more photos at the second location, the flat from which the shot was fired. Here are some essential clues. If you found nothing in both locations, you've been playing with a paper bag over your head. If you found Sydney's wallet, opened his briefcase and then went on to discover a fag end, a bullet cartridge and a fingerprint; you're incredibly brainy and need no more help from me. Collect 200 search warrants and go on to the next stage.

The real fun starts here because this is where you get to interrogate people - put that truncheon away. The second sections lets you do five things. Firstly, you can collect statements from anyone whose name and address you know. Without the address, you wouldn't know how to get there, would you?

It's at this point, by the way, you wish that you'd written down the notes you read in the first section. Getting the necessary information at the beginning is essential. Carrying on without it is like going to the North Pole without bedsocks - completely unprepared.

You can use the police computer to get information from various official sources. Statements can be compared and ballistic and autopsy reports can be perused. Finally, you make an arrest when you feel sufficiently confident of not being done for wrongful arrest. Don't bother with this if you're imagining yourself as Dempsey. I'm more in the Dixon of Dock Green mould.

But you'll spend most of your time collecting statements, because this is the only way clues can be dug up. And you must start, clever as you are, with the only witness at the scene of the crime and with Sydney's family. Remember, he had a wife and two children.

Now there's lots of clever programming going on here. If you manage to dig up a piece of information, you can go back and question someone who had nothing to say earlier and, hey presto, they start spilling the beans. Gather together enough material and you can use the Comparison function to corroborate stories.

Take Sydney's wife. She only comes clean about divorce proceedings after you've talked to Decol, Sydney's lawyer. And what's this about photos taken by a private dick called Renard? And just as you were reaching in despair for another Gitane, up comes Tino the greasy, moustachioed Italian. Could Tino be the Latin lover responsible for the divorce proceedings? Was Sydney a manically jealous husband. Were they all just acting out parts from Dallas?

Well, I'm not saying any more. I have, of course, cracked this case and make been nominated for a medal d'Honneur. But it's worth noting that there's quite a few lies being told, and that various people aren't as forthcoming with information as they should be.

The program instructions say 'Beware the red herring', but I tried, with little success, to question this red herring to find out how it could have fired a high-velocity rifle.

The Sydney Affair is a pretty enjoyable sleuthing game and it's forgiving on text input. You don't have to type in a whole name or a whole street to get a response.

But I have a few criticisms. If you do make a mistake, you simply get the message 'without interest'. That's not always true. You may have got the name right but not the address.

The same goes for messages on the police database. Responses like 'addresses not known' or 'addresses not relevant' and all too frequent. There's simply no attempt to tell you what you've done wrong.

As for the graphis, only the first section with its two locations shows any graphic merit. After that, all you get are the faces of the protagonists. That's rather disappointing; they could and should have done something more imaginative. As faces go, though, they're pretty good. The goodies look good and the baddies seem to have moustaches (this evidence is not admissible in court).

The Sydney Affair should please all of you who sleuthed around in Vera Cruz. It's not as difficult but will provide quite a few hours of brain-bashing before you find out why James Sydney ended up in the mortuary.