Of course, being an adventure game, The Nomad Soul has a proper plot. Torn through an interdimensional breach in true clich... ahem, sci-fi tradition, you enter the body of a detective, who you then control. And, get this, you've no idea what's going on, but are compelled to put it right. Whatever 'it' may be. For a large part of its opening events, The Nomad Soul's storyline drip-feeds snatches of background detail, a mosaic of backplot that grows with each conversational exchange. Compelled to follow a linear route through seemingly expansive locales, you tag along with the story, completing simple puzzles and tasks. Later, you get to swap bodies, which is always nice.

And then, suddenly, you're stuck. At this point, The Nomad Soul's on-screen text displays really spring to life. "I can't do that," it says. "I'd better not disturb him/her," it remarks. "That doesn't make sense," it might add, with alarming regularity. Suddenly, and abruptly, this atmospheric, absorbing and adult-oriented adventure is revealed as an ailing fake; a linear fraud, of sorts. Like videogame adventures since the dawn of time, it makes the erroneous assumption that everyone will immediately discern the flavour of its puzzle logic. Not true. There's this one point, quite early on, where a particular dilemma can be solved in two different ways. Neither, however, is immediately obvious, because they're so obvious, in a weird kind of way. You might not think, "Hey! That important person sitting by a computer terminal has just asked me to get her a coffee. Perhaps I can drug it and use her terminal while she's out, in order to access those top secret archives I need to find!"

Videogame logic differs from its real-life equivalent, obviously, in the sense that there are infinitesimally less choices or solutions available to you. Annoyingly, The Nomad Soul has a tendency to present you with a puzzle with a perfectly reasonable resolution. Of course, you don't realise this at first. Later, with the problem dispelled, you encounter another poser, but this one is rather more obtuse. You can think of several other solutions, and they're perfectly plausible, but the game isn't programmed to recognise them. So, predictably, you wander around, plot flapping in a breeze of wasted, weary minutes spent in pursuit of person X or object Y.