Cool as a pocketful of 20-sided dice, hip as a t-shirt reading "Beware of Sauron," Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits is not the sort of game you want to be caught playing when the girl of your dreams pops over for a surprise visit. It is about the nerdiest thing you can do with your PlayStation, short of actually taking the thing apart and poking at it with a soldering iron. It is a deeply traditional role-playing game (RPG), complete with monsters, magic, and a whiny young male hero who is about to come of age and who understands neither his destiny nor the fearsome strength of his own powers. If you like that sort of thing, Twilight of the Spirits will be right up your alley and you will not care one way or another about being caught at its controls. (Also, the girl of your dreams will be Jolene Blalock and you will not need to worry about her popping over for a surprise visit.)

Like nearly every RPG ever committed to disc, Twilight of the Spirits is set in a halfway-modern, halfway medieval fairyland. People live in simple wood-and-plaster Tudor homes. They hesitate to wander outside the village gates. They carry swords and shields. They have canvas windmills all over the place. But the barn just up the hill houses a big airship, the corner store sells imported tropical fruit at reasonable prices, and the whole economy depends on precious fossil fuels. So just when it all takes place is a bit of a mystery. In any case, there is trouble afoot.

The big problem is those fossil fuels, or "Spirit Stones." Apparently they provide all sorts of power, and have turned a shabby little dump of a country into a well-to-do showpiece. Unfortunately, supplies are too short to meet demand. Even more unfortunately, a race of evil monsters called "Deimos" also finds Spirit Stones useful, which means a lot of fighting and grief and probably all-out war.

As the game begins, you take control of Kharg, the whiny young male hero. You are supposed to be a prince, but your mother took the monarchy apart and replaced it with a sort of utopian republic years ago, so you are not destined to rule. You do lead a privileged existence, however, and a security detail follows you around and calls you "Lord." You spend the early going wandering around the village, talking to people and waiting for something fun to happen. Eventually you find your way past your minders and into the great beyond, where you get in a lot of swordfights and collect a lot of gold and learn a lot of magical spells. You have a mysterious birthmark/tattoo thingy on your bicep.

Later you take control of another young hero, a half-monster, half-human named "Darc," whose arm bears a birthmark/tattoo thingy exactly like Kharg's. Maybe they are related. Maybe their destinies are intertwined. Maybe the people who make these games should try getting their ideas from a different well because this one's gone all dry.

As you roam the land in search of Spirit Stones and adventure, you do a lot of fighting. You take turns with the bad guys. First you press the "attack" button, and Kharg/Darc leaps toward the enemy with his sword, and then a number flashes on the screen to indicate how badly the bad guy has been hurt (or, in RPG parlance, how many "hit points" he has lost). Then the bad guy gets a slice at you, and another number flashes. Get the bad guy's point total down to zero and you win the fight.

The process is not physically demanding, and is easy to manage with one hand in a sack of corn chips. Credit where credit is due: Somebody has done good research on the target demographic.