Title: Cypher: Code of Ruin
Genre: Adventure
Big Word: Shyt
Strap: The subtitle being some sort of warning, we imagine.

Richard Cobbett said to me this evening, "I go to sleep as soon as a game turns into wandering through a trap filled temple pressing rock buttons. It's like the game spitting in your face." For Richard, Cypher would be one long tendril of drool, constantly seeping into his sleeping eyes.

Here’s the premise: you are a super-sleek, superspy, equipped with state-of-the-art gadgetry, ready to take on the source of a dangerous computer virus released by some terrorist evil. Here’s the location: an underground temple in Babylon. Here’s the confusion: pardon? In an extraordinary decision, The Adventure Company chose to set ninety per cent of their "stealth and espionage" game in an ancient abandoned ruin, containing neither life forms nor anything to do with spying whatsoever.

Instead, and once more, you meander from room to room pressing buttons until a door opens somewhere, or an ancient ruined piano falls on your head as punishment for walking on the Unmarked Tile of Certain Doom. A typical puzzle consists of saving, pressing the switches and pulling the levers to learn which ones will randomly murder you, reloading, and then pressing the others until something goes click. This is occasionally accompanied by the game murdering you, and now and then results in a new passage being revealed.

Of course, being an TAC game, it can’t be that simple. Oh no, it has to be the cheap store brand version of ‘genre-busting’, by attempting to incorporate something that really oughtn’t be there. This time it’s the Gamebryo engine, meaning that we experience this rubbish as if it were a third person action game. However, since this is a spy who carries no weapons and can meet no other human being throughout the game, "action" isn’t a word you’d throw around too much. And nor would "stealth", since your character /jogs/ everywhere he goes. But that doesn’t seem to have put them off.

The last hour of this six hour punishment is set in the secret spy base deep beneath the temple. At this point, you get to use all three gadgets that you’ve been lugging throughout. And oh boy, do you get to use them. Over, and over, and over again, to do the exact same door-opening task each and every time. Stupid, lazy bugs make this a nauseating experience, at the same time as you realise the astonishingly lazy design means you’ve no way of monitoring how much you have of each piece of equipment, and hence no idea of how to balance their use.