[Please read the following intro in the overly dramatic style of a classic American TV show cliffhanger narrator!] Can you help Dirk the Daring dodge the fiendish traps that await him in the gloomy castle? Will you be able to rescue the Princess Daphne and defeat the fearsome dragon that protects her, sleeping upon his bed of gold and precious treasure? Can you navigate the many obstacles that lie in your path, slay the vicious monsters that will stop at nothing to kill you and avoid the many possible deaths that stand between you and your true love? Enter the Dragon's Lair and find out!

Or don't.

Dragon's Lair is something of a nostalgic curiosity from the Eighties - it's literally an interactive animation, where carefully timed button presses determine whether the next few frames that play see you progressing further into the scene or see you burned, crushed, drowned, sliced, eaten, assaulted or fall to your death, amongst many other possible fates. Dragon's Lair HD is actually a Blu-Ray disc rather than a game and the various bits of each scene in the game are played from the disc in a sequence that's determined by your success or failure. The highlight is without doubt the wonderful art of legendary animator Don Bluth, who has been behind many a classic family film over the years. His fluid and distinctive cartoon style is a joy to behold and this high definition restoration is the best looking version of Dragon's Lair ever to hit the market. The sound effects are classic cartoon fare too, while the overly dramatic soundtrack adds to the fun of the animation itself.

However, you don't really get a chance to enjoy the animation, because you're too busy dying over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again (yes, really that much!) because the gameplay, such as it is, involves largely trial and error choices of five possible buttons - up, down, left, right and enter, which makes Dirk use his sword. Some of the time it's obvious which option to choose but other times it's really not, and with multiple choices in every scene you find yourself making a couple of correct choices, dying, starting the scene again, repeating the right decisions until you get to the one that stumped you, trying something else, dying, replaying the scene, then you get it right, but you get the next one wrong or don't react in time (sometimes you only get a split second to react and even if you hit the right button, the wrong timing will cause you to die), and you replay from the beginning, over and over until you get it right and progress to the next scene. It's not exactly what I'd call fun! Meanwhile, the jerky transition to the death scenes really grates, the death animation itself drives you nuts and indeed the whole thing is so fast and bitty that it's like watching bits of a cartoon spliced together (which indeed is what it is), so there's little flow to the action. Set the lives to unlimited and get the on-screen visual prompts switched on - they help by making certain things flash to give you a clue of what to do when you're stumped.

There are a number of scenes to play through and their concepts are fun and varied - swinging across a flaming pit on ropes, dodging crumbling ledges while fending off attacks from bats and spiders, steering a raft down some rapids with rocky outcrops and whirlpools to dodge, guiding a flying mechanical horse between pillars and walls of fire, leaping this way and that to avoid traps and monsters before landing that lethal blow and then dodging some more - it should be fun.

However, the first scene pretty much sets the tone for the game; you fall through a rotten drawbridge and your instinct is to hit 'up' to climb back up, but instead you have to use your sword to fend off the tentacled monster that tries to attack you, then you clamber upwards and on into the castle. There's no indication of the controls either - I don't have a DVD remote and it took me a little while to realise that X is used for the sword (maybe that's obvious, but it took a good few deaths and a look at the manual, which doesn't even tell you to use X if you're using the PS3 controller, before I understood why I couldn't climb up to avoid those tentacles!) The next room sees a door opening and a crumbling floor, so leap through the door to your right or get buried under a rock fall. The scenes get gradually more complex until the grand finale in the Dragon's Lair, which took me about half an hour to beat - making my total playing time about one hour and twenty minutes!

There's no longevity here and you'll need the patience of a saint to sit through the whole game, despite its incredibly short length. The bonus features are a nice touch - interviews with Don Bluth and two of the other creators talking about various aspects of the game, its creation and restoration, plus you can watch the whole feature (about twenty minutes including all the death scenes) with or without a video commentary and there's a comparison piece showing the various states of the game over the years (seeing it on Amiga is a blast from the past!) These bonuses make this Blu-Ray disc a collector's item in its own right, so if you're a fan of the game and enjoy such things then it's worth picking up for this almost more than the game itself.

Dragon's Lair HD is an archaic curiosity that might have been fun back when it was first released but simply doesn't work as a game concept, at least not in the way it's implemented on this Blu-Ray disc. Trial and error gameplay with annoyingly precise timing of button pushes where it's often not too obvious what to push and exactly when (hammering the button or direction you think works sometimes does the trick) does not make for fun gameplay, or really any kind of gameplay at all. Rent this if you like, but you'll probably spend less time playing it than you will watching a regular Blu-Ray movie through just the once, and you'll enjoy it far less than a quality movie too. Daphne might be the sexiest princess ever to grace a game, but she's just not worth the hassle!

Reviewed by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).