Following Infidel and Suspended, Michael Berlyn, one of Infocom's top authors, has once again brought together the right ingredients to create yet another superb Adventure.

in Cut-throats you are a skin diver who happens to be on an island called Hardscrabble. You are approached by a bunch of cut-throats who make a proposition, involving you locating two sunken wrecks containing treasure. You have just learned of the location of these ships from an old map entrusted to you for safe keeping by an old shipmate only minutes before he was killed in a scuffle by a couple of shadowy characters, just outside your hotel room.

Your instincts tell you to have nothing to do with the proposition, but with such high stakes, you consider it worth taking the risk.

First you have to go about getting the necessary equipment to make the dive, at the same time attempting to keep your new-found colleagues from selling each other out. Not an easy task at the best of times.

in the second half of the Adventure, you start diving in earnest. There are two wrecks and each time you play the wreck your find is determined at random. Depending upon which ship you are allotted, the plot differs in a very subtle way, having the effect of making Cut-throats two Adventures in one. Some of the differences are so small that it's very easy to miss them altogether, but if missed, the result can be murder - as I found out once or twice to my cost.

In conclusion, Cut-throats is an Adventure that I personally enjoyed immensely. It has not got the most difficult of puzzles, but then it is graded as a standard level game aimed at Adventurers of moderate skill. But it has a good plot and a great sense of humour.

Cut-throats is available for a wide range of computers, all requiring disc drive, including Atari 48K and Commodore 64, from infocom.