Bytten

I've seen many dungeon-crawling games involving a central character taking up a sword and shield and battling monsters. I've not seen as many do so in first-person mode, and I've never seen any set in a medieval Czech town before Legie. Combining puzzles with combat and a very strict limitation on spending your cash, it plays more like a first person shooter (without the shooting).

I ultimately found it somewhat unforgiving when I got to actual dungeon combat, which was a shame - getting to this stage was wonderfully clever. You actually start out as a barkeeper's assistant, pulling pints and mopping up vomit, so it's probably a step up in life to enter the old mines and risk being hacked to death by mad warriors. I never did manage to survive more than a couple of levels into the mine, alas, but what I saw was very encouraging.

Dante and Virgil are sent on a mission by God to descend into Hell, so that Dante can write poetry about it and convince everyone on Earth that they really don't want to end up there. Dante is also shown Purgatory, and finally permitted a glimpse of Heaven. With me so far? This is the premise of Dante's Divine Comedy, a piece of literature from a few centuries ago that, I am sorry to admit, I have never read. Mind you, the original text IS in Italian.

Enter The Story is an unusual take on reading old works of fiction; you control the main characters. Not directly; you put thoughts into their head, by clicking on items and then clicking on the character. These items can be in far off locations or the same room. Your task, as Dante's guardian angel, is to solve a series of puzzles to take Dante and his guide deeper into Hell - even meeting Satan himself! If you get stuck, you can return to Heaven for advice.

This was a strange experience as it combined the concept of interactive fiction with a plethora of classical music, minimally drawn characters on ornate backgrounds and some wonderful additions to the original text. Why are the depths of Hell so frozen? Satan mutters something about superconductivity, which I'm pretty sure wasn't in Dante's work...! But then, of course, this journey inspires Dante, and he'll write what he believes - so anything he considers wrong or irrelevant, he'll leave out! Brilliant! It also combines with other Enter The Story tales; most notably Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, meaning there's a whole world to explore beyond the current story.