Rhiannon is different to most games people are playing today. No fast cars, alien races, quick time events or even other people; just old school point and click puzzling. Set on a farmstead in Wales, you arrive just to house sit until the owners get back, only to find there's something not quite right going on...

It's been a while since I'd last played a point-and-click game and my experience is more Broken Sword than Myst, which was fun only for MIT professors. Needless to say the playing style and game pacing took a little getting used to. This is a stripped-down game, for the puzzling SAS: no objectives, no hints, no given story apart from an introductory email. You have to find out the objectives by coming across the items with which to solve them.

You really will have to search the house and surrounding area to find all the materials you need to advance the story and solve objectives, as some of them are hidden away in the cheekiest places, like a photo underneath a window sill which you have to wiggle away from the frame! It took me over an hour just to get in the house, turn the lights on, flush a mouse down the loo (yes, really) and start a fire. But there's an amazing sense of achievement when you solve even the 'simplest' of tasks!

It turns out the house is built surrounding an ancient Celtic legend involving a nasty sorcerer and a girl called Rhiannon, which is coincidentally the same name as your mate's daughter, who has been apparently going a bit mental over the last few weeks. So as the house turns into a Welsh version of Poltergeist it's up to you to stop the nasty ghost sorcerer from killing the young Rhiannon.

If I've made the story sound exciting then I've given it a bit too much credit as for scares it ranks right up there with an episode of The Good Life - Whoever though setting a horror story in Wales would work was obviously away when they taught plausibility in storywriting class. Welsh ghost-sorcerers and cheesy midi music really doesn't make me jump, no matter how much echo you put on it. Although some parts of the story and puzzles are great fun there's a bit of a theme running through it: nature. I was never a naturalist, so being forced to read about the pseudo-profession homeopathy and cosmology was made even more tedious by being forced to read a book on trees and walking around the farm using your new knowledge to pick up appropriate tree branches.

Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches has some tough puzzles and will leave you racking your brain trying to figure out the next way forward, which is exactly what you want in a point and click adventure: hard puzzles, no help, no other characters, just lots of story (and reading). However the story really is less than enthralling and fails to engage or frighten while disengaging the player by creating some tedious puzzles (some of the nature ones in particular).