Call of Cthulhu: Darkness Within - Book 1

Lovecraft is just about the best surname in the world – even better than Glasscock, Butt and Gaylord. The man who made the name famous, though, was a rather odd and disappointingly racist writer of horror stories in the early 20th century.

If you've never read a H. P. Lovecraft story there are a few movies (such as Re-animator) based on his work and games as well (particularly the first Alone in the Dark).

Call of Cthulhu: Darkness Within - Book 1 is a graphic adventure, a fact the game seems ever so desperate to tell you from the very first intro screen. From the moment the pixellated characters start jawing away in bright primary coloured fonts older gamers will instantly be reminded of LucasArts adventures such as The Secret Of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

If, however, you've still got all your own hair it's perhaps best to think of Call of Cthulhu as a sort of role-playing game without the combat - or an interactive movie without 'teh suck'. You play the role of an archaeology student who's sent to Cario to check up on his professor, who seems to have gone crackers while investigating some mysterious ruins.

As with most of Lovecraft's work the Cthulhu stories are all about nameless horrors and cults plotting the destruction of the world. The stories are usually hopelessly bleak in their outlook, steeped in impending doom. Which, as you might imagine, is a terribly difficult atmosphere to pull off in a mobile game.

And yet to its credit Spanish team Mayhem Studio has done a sterling job here, with an unsettling plot where everyone seems as unhelpful and belligerent as possible. The greatest worry we had, especially after that press release, was the dialogue, but in actual fact it's pretty good. Certainly there are some spelling mistakes and odd phrasings but it's well above the video game norm and gets across everything it needs to quickly and efficiently.

The interface is a little more complex than it needs to be, with up to four different action commands (from a mixture of Talk, Look, Take, Use and Move) available for any object your cursor highlights as being interactive, but on the whole this is a very solid graphic adventure.

The only real trouble is that the game doesn't always highlight objects when it should, even when you're standing right next to them. It also won't automatically move you close enough to interact with them either, which is a bit of a slog.

With a whole town to wander around and conduct your investigations in this is an impressively complete and well-presented affair - even the music is appropriately off kilter and creepy.

It does come at a cost though, as the 'Book 1' subtitle suggests it isn't very long and there's a good 5 or 10 seconds of loading between every location. The game is hardly faced paced enough for the latter to harm it much though, and while it lasts this is both a better horror game and graphic adventure than you'd ever think possible on a mobile phone.