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An Alice In Wonderland adventure game sounds good, but if you're late for a very important date you can't spend hours typing in awkward phrases. Ed Ricketts asks whether Wonderland's new control system is one to lose your head over

Remember those good old text adventures? "You can see a light." GET LIGHT. "You can't see a light." Ah, those were the days - spending hours trying to get the parser to understand CUT ROPE, and even longer working out that it was only capable of understanding DESCEND THE CRAGGY RAVINE and not CLIMB DOWN.

Well, those days have gone, and good riddance to them. Adventurers nowadays want to be taxed by the puzzles in the game, not the game itself, so Magnetic Scrolls have produced Wonderland, a user-friendly adaptation of Alice In Wonderland. It's liberally sprinkled with windows, icons and such like, so you should feel at home right away - er, in theory.

You begin the game with absolutely no idea of what you goal might be, but you soon find out. Falling asleep and starting to dream, you leave your sister Emily behind on the river bank and wander off into a pear grove, where all the pears suddenly turn into lanterns. Pick a lantern - you need it later - and find the rabbit hole. From there on it, it's a case of exploring, collecting and discovering.

What makes the game really interesting is that there are two ways of executing commands. You could play the whole game simply by typing everything in as normal, or you could make use of all the accessory windows. Instead of typing EXAMINE PEAR, for instance, just double-click on the pear in the Items in Room window. Then if you decide to pick it up, drag its icon to your inventory window. It's as simple as that. If there's something in the graphic that looks interesting, click with the right mouse button on it to bring up its description. Everything has been arranged to make playing the game as straightforward and intuitive as possible. But be warned: although Wonderland is capable of running perfectly happily on a bog-standard 520ST, on this machine you have only the Session and Graphics windows available - there just isn't enough memory for the full range explained in the box below.

A great deal of effort has been put in to make Wonderland look as attractive as possible. There is a graphic of some sort for almost every location and most of them are very well drawn. Animated scenes are scarcer but always excellent: streams gurgle smoothly by and frog henchmen march up 'n down. You can even choose between four fonts and many sizes of text, though you really need to be in high res for the best text output - and this means sacrificing the colour graphics. It's a boon to find sound in Wonderland as well, though the occasional sound-chip tunes can best be described as adequate.

It's quite a brave step for Virgin to attempt to introduce a new adventure environment with such a well-known theme as Alice in Wonderland - there's the chance that they could have screwed up the story but also the new system. Thankfully, they seem to have succeeded with both. The windows aren't just a gimmick - they genuinely make playing the game more manageable, though there are still times when it's quicker to type in a command than fiddle about with icons. There is an initial familiarisation period during which you must accustom yourself to the system and arrange your windows as you like, but once you're past that you can concentrate on the game. Having the map and being able to move straight to a location cuts out much tedious typing; however, there is a danger that you can become distracted and spend more time playing with the windows than with the game itself.

One of the major drawbacks is the constant pause for disk accessing which grows almost unacceptable when a long graphic sequence is loaded. Hard drive users should be pleased to hear that the whole game may be installed - uncompressed graphics and all - onto one partition, but the vast majority of game-players don't have this luxury.

Ad adventures go, Wonderland isn't terribly difficult - and even if you do get stuck there's always the help function (if you bear the guilt). On the whole, then, a success, but not quite in the Format Gold category. Doubtless there will be improvements to Virgin's Magnetic Windows adventure control system, and maybe future Virgin adventure games might make the grade one these have been implemented. For now, a sound and highly absorbing first attempt.