Producer: Melbourne House
Retail Price: £8.95
Author: Mike Lewis, Carl Cropley

Please, please don't make me go through this one again. I've read the instructions three times and I'm still not convinced there's much point in playing this game. It's not just that The Mystery Of Arkham Manor is annoyingly slow, or that it's fundamentally boring, it's that there doesn't seem to be a concrete way of scoring.

Let me explain. You are a freelance reporter on assignment for The London Chronicle. The idea is to jot down events in your notebook and take photographs with those newfangled things called 'cameras', this being back in 1924, when people got their news from things called 'newspapers'.

Only trouble is, how does the computer know if you've compiled a good report for your newspaper, or just made the stuff up?

And it's not just scoring which is hit or miss.

You're following up a story in Arkham, a quiet country village. One Colonel Lemin, a former MP and member of the Foreign Office, has sent a letter to the Chronicle describing some peculiar happenings around the hamlet.

After a so-so intro tune, you begin the game armed with the Colonel's letter and a note in your notebook to meet the old blighter at the railway station. He doesn't meet you, though, and playing a little further you find out why - he's dead.

You get this piece of vital information from his wife, who I snapped as one of my photographs. Don't ask me what you must photograph -I couldn't tell you. Scoring and finding a direction to the game is not easy.

Direction, indeed... that reminds me of something I'll get to after telling you about this camera lark.

It being 1924, your camera is one of the early portable plate jobs. It's not in the same league as today's models, and you'll find it impossible to move the viewfinder above head height. Luckily, the camera assumes you want the head above the neck as well!

There are three photographic plates which can be reused; they're shown at the bottom left of the screen. The cursor-controlled movement of the viewfinder is jerky, like just about every control in the game. (The menu system is particularly clumsy and awkward, and slows things down.)

Right, that direction business I was on about. As if the game didn't have enough major failings, the programmer throws in an absolutely mad movement system: your character walks into a new location from the opposite side to the one you've chosen.

This crazy mannerism isn't apparent at every move, but it does fit in with the scheme of things in a game that doesn't know were it's going or which way it's facing. Knowing where you're going and where you might end up is almost impossible.

The report area, where you construct your own page for the The London Chronicle, isn't immune from bugs though it's important. Selecting a headline and then a photo I found that, quite rightly, my write-up began next to the photo, forming a neat border. But the next line of text ran right through the photo, ruining it.

I got a little fed up with my career at The London Chronicle and decided Arkham Manor was best left to the zombies that roam its graveyard. May old Lemin rest in peace.

DIFFICULTY: instructions are too clever and stupid at the same time
GRAPHICS: good
PRESENTATION: good
INPUT FACILITY: menus leading to submenus
RESPONSE: acceptable

FAX BOX
Game: The Mystery of Arkham Manor
Publisher: Melbourne House
Price: £8.95

Melbourne House has come in for some stick from adventure fans of late, thanks to Lord Of The Rings and its faults, and Redhawk and Kwah! being less than successful in their attempts to bring the comic-book approach to adventuring. But at least it continues to try something different, and the two-part Mystery Of Arkham Manor is certainly that, and this time very successful in my view.

It's Monday June 23rd, 1924, and Arkham Manor is the home of Colonel Lemin, a figure well-known to readers of The London Chronicle, for which you are a leading freelance news reporter. The editor has received an alarming letter from the Colonel reporting strange events in the village, and you've been sent to find out exactly what's going on.

The game is so realistic, it's incredible the amount of detail that's been packed in, but here are some of the things that you have with you to help you solve the Mystery of Arkham Manor:

THE NOTEBOOK: The reporter's stand-by, though you really ought to save up and buy a new one as this has only got four pages left. On the other hand maybe you'll never need another as the ERASE command can be used again and again, and the PRINT command will enable you to send the pages to any printer that happens to be lying round. Don't forget to read the first page to remind you of something at the start of the game, and then jot down anything that you come across which you think might be relevant.

THE CAMERA: Then you've got a camera, with three even more magical re-usable photographic plates, and you can move a cursor round any screen to take a photo of anything on it, to incorporate these into the articles you're going to be writing for sending back to your paper in London.

TELEGRAMS: Need some info? Any self-respecting newspaper has a large library of reference books and cuttings files, and you can request information on people and places by sending telegrams. First you have to be in the telegram office, and secondly you'll need the money to pay for them.

STORIES: This brings up a blank page of the London Chronicle, and the options to place headlines, text or photos on the page.

You arrive at Arkham Station on Monday morning and your notebook reminds you that you've got an appointment with Colonel Lemin in Harrison Street. Movement is by using the cursor keys after selecting the MOVE option, though you can speed things up by pressing a cursor key as soon as your character arrives in a location - then he'll move straight on to the next. Arrows at the foot of the screen point to the available exits.

No-one should be surprised to know that when you get to Harrison Street, Lemin isn't there - unless I just missed him by dallying in the lounge bar exchanging pleasantries with the barman, who told me he needed some flour. Picking up the very convenient grain of corn, it didn't take me long to provide that for him, in return for which I got a wine bottle, though he wouldn't allow me into the guest room as that cost 1/- a night and I was skint. The prospect of finding 3/- to pay for a telegram was even more remote, so time to get down to work and file a story.

In addition to all this, there's a status window which shows your cash situation, the knowledge you've acquired, and your sanity, which is seriously affected by disturbing encounters with zombies in graveyards, but benefits from simple things like rest and sleep.

One drawback is obviously that the more you pack into a program, the more restricted the adventure-game elements are, and I'd guess that the game might not take too long to solve in comparison to your 'real' adventure, but the whole brilliant idea of the game will more than make up for that - desktop publishing meets the detective adventure mystery!

Label: Melbourne House
Price: £7.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Gary Rook

Why's my editor sent me out with my camera and notepad to this sleepy village in the depths of the country.

But wait - what was that noise? Like grating stone... It came from over there. Grave robbers? A burglars rendevouz? Spies? Let's have a look... Great Johosephal! A pit opens underneath my feet; the stench of rotting flesh overpowers my senses; in the moments before sanity leaves me, I catch a glimpse of something terrible, something obscene...

The Mystery of Arkham Manor is the latest adventure from Melbourne House - but if you think that means verb/noun two word instructions, then think again. Arkham Manor is a sophisticated menu-driven adventure, with animated graphics, plus a built-in and very simple Fleet Street Editor-type program all of its very own. Phew! What, all in one tape?

Complicated it may be, but it all fits together like a dream (in parts like a nightmare). The instructions you get to start you off are not exactly over detailed, consisting of one A4-sized fake 1920's newspaper. As far as I can work it out, the idea is that you're as much in the dark as you start to play the game as your character is supposed to be.

The game screen is divided into four areas. The top half contains a graphics window, in which a picture of your present location is displayed, along with whoever happens to be in it, and a menu, such as Move, Examine, Use, Read, Take - the basic adventure commands. The bottom half of the screen has two windows; the right-hand one is used for extra information - who is in a location with you, what people are saying - as well as being where anything you say appears. The left-hand window has various uses. Objects in a location can appear there, or you can see what pictures you have managed to take with your camera, or you can get your notepad or diary to appear there. At the bottom of the screen arrows tell you how many exits there are in your present location, and which direction they are.

As you move about the village and the surrounding district, your character strides through a graphic representation of the particular location he is in. Other characters may also be present. If they are, then you can try to ask them questions, or even take pictures of them. You'd be better off, though, using the camera on monsters, like the zombie in the graveyard.

To take pictures, you select Camera from the menu; a cursor appears on screen, representing what's in you view-finder, and you also get a picture of what you would be taking if you were to press the button shown at the bottom left. Make sure you're aiming at what you want, ask them to say cheese, press the button, and hey presto, a picture.

You're not entirely alone. You can go to the telegraph office, and wire The Chronicle asking for information about the vicar, for example, and they'll check their files and wire you back any information next day.

Once you think you've got something worth writing about, you can select Report. This allows you to use the screen to lay out your story; you get to write the headlines, decide where to put the pictures, as well as actually do the reporting. Once you've got the front page of The Chronicle just as you want it, then you can dump it to a printer. Rupert Murdoch, eat your heart out - no need for Wapping with The London Chronicle.

Your reporter is actually going to discover some exceedingly nasty stuff, and slowly but surely is going to be driven mad. If your sanity score ever drops to zero, that's it - you're carried off to the loony bin and that's the end of the game.

I found it difficult to work out how to move initially, but once I got the hang of it it became pretty compulsive, although the animated graphics aren't really all that brilliant. They're a bit like those in Gargoyle's Tir Na Nog, only not as good. But for the purposes of the game they're fine. The menu system can also be a bit of a pain at times, until you get used to it. To begin with I kept on entering the same command time after time, but that was my own fault.

Apart from these limitations I got really quite deeply hooked by Arkham Manor. I was impressed with the scope and variety of gameplay and I suspect that the basic challenge - getting the whole story without flipping your lid - is going to hook a lot of people.

It's a complicated game idea presented in as simple a way as possible, and it deserves to be a big hit.