Are We There Yet? - Electronic Arts - RRP œ29.99 (Puzzle Game - PC) Reviewed by Neil Shipman People play adventures for a variety of different reasons, but high on everyone's list of their favourite aspects of adventuring must surely be the love of solving puzzles. Are We There Yet? is a collection of puzzles like crosswords, jigsaws, magic squares, concatenations, word jumbles, quotefalls, rebuses, word searches, crosstics, hangman, mazes and cryptograms designed by the same team which put together The Fool's Errand, though, sadly, lacking any contribution from Cliff Johnson, the writer of that excellent game. The framework on which the puzzles are hung is the vacation of the Mallard family - Drake, Mom, Tiffany and Blip - across the states of the USA, visiting some of the more unusual tourist attractions. No trip to the Grand Canyon, the Statue of Liberty or Disneyworld for this bunch of rubbernecks. Instead, they make their way to places like the Hall of Flame Museum in Phoenix, Arizona; the Big Pig Jig in Vienna, Georgia; Bill and Blanche's Pancake House near Killington, Vermont; the Snake-A-Torium in Florida and Rockport's Paper House in Massachusetts. The very first puzzle is a jigsaw of the USA and solving this will give you immediate access to 9 of the states, each of which has two places of interest and two major puzzles associated with it. But you don't just get two puzzles per state. Each major one might be made up of several smaller ones or, perhaps, followed by yet another mind boggler. Success at each destination is rewarded by a comment from one of the members of the family and, more importantly, a souvenir. These are usually tacky items like a rubber rat, chattering teeth or a plastic orchid, but they go to make up the final puzzle in the game. They are shown on a separate full screen and as soon as you click on a picture of each of the 99 available souvenirs it flips over to reveal part of a complex jigsaw showing memorable moments from the Mallard's trip. When you solve a particular state's puzzles then it is highlit on the main map of the USA, a cross appears against its name in the menu and you find that one or more new states can now be accessed. The interface is very smooth with a pull down menu system which enables you to skip quickly between destinations - so if you get stuck on one puzzle it is very easy to leave that and take a look at another instead. Nearly all the puzzles can be solved using the mouse although a few do require you to type in letters from the keyboard. The graphics - in particular the pictures of the family - are not very detailed and look rather like the sort of thing you see in a low budget, children's TV cartoon. The slow, jerky animation is similarly disappointing and, apart from its use in some clever animated jigsaws, is completely unnecessary. There are 226 puzzles in all, some of them fairly easy (and one or two rather boring and repetitive) but by far the majority are very difficult. It is quite possible to spend hours completely stumped trying to fathom out a magic square or looking for hidden words in a word search, especially when they might include Americanisms like goober, moxie and kegler! Electronic Arts have recognised the fact that nearly everyone will get stuck at some point and have included a Travel Guide which contains the answers to all your puzzling questions. Unfortunately, if you look at this you cannot avoid seeing the complete solution to the puzzle you are working on - and you may inadvertently see the answer to one which you have yet to tackle. The sensible thing to do, therefore, is to get someone else to look at the book and give you a hint when you need it. Are We There Yet? is much more difficult than The Fool's Errand (which I preferred), the adventuring theme which holds the puzzles together is a good deal weaker and the final puzzle is not as interesting as the Sun's Map restored by the Fool. This is not a puzzle game for the faint-hearted and you really need to be a dedicated puzzler to get the most out of it.