APPRENTICE: The Testing of a Magical Novice - Bert Lee
 (AGT Text Adventure for the ST (PD 319), PC (PD 320) and Amiga)

                  Reviewed by Matthew Pegg

In "Apprentice" you play the aforementioned novice and you are
about to be tested by your master the magii.  They don't give much
away.  You are given some strange objects including a stone
engraved with strange signs, a compass and a flute and told to get
them to the 'House of the Lunar Transit' in Darhad, wherever that
is.  If you do this you will be admitted to the house.  There are
some other tasks which will raise your status if you can manage
them.

They vary from dreaming something into the real world, doing some
healing, and learning any magic at all; to retrieving lost objects
of power and ridding the world of one of those ultimate evil
beings which crop up such a lot in these places.

This is all you are told before you are dumped into a dingy little
cell with a limited supply of air and no clue at all to how you
might escape.  These magii are fairly callous types: if you don't
work out how to escape within a very short time you suffocate!
(Give me a GCSE course any day!)

Careful examination of your pockets will give you something to
help you out and soon you find yourself in the middle of a
trackless desert with no idea of how to find your way to where you
are going.  You will find a companion in the ruins of your cell
and looking after his well-being is a full time job in itself:
he's an injured mouse! (Aaaah)

Luckily you have a compass and you soon find that the desert isn't
as trackless as it seems, in fact it is only a few repeating
locations.  If you explore carefully you are soon in yet another
pickle:  dumped into the sea by an angry mother roc. Your mouse is
swept away (sob!) and you soon drown, although there is a long
bearded sailor in a stone tub who might help....

And did I mention the camel in the desert?  I didn't mention the
camel in the desert...must be because I couldn't find out what he
was there for.....

You'll probably gather from this that "Apprentice" is not an easy
game. And you'd be right. I didn't get that far into it and I must
admit that I cheated:  I had to have a search through the game
files with the "Revenge" document displayer in order to find a
clue of how to get out of the first location!  After that it got
easier, but not much.  In atmosphere the game is similar to
Infocom's "Spellbreaker", which is no bad thing and the game is
about as difficult.  Most of the puzzles are logical but you have
to use trial and error, there are precious few clues. Descriptions
are atmospheric although responses to wrong inputs are a bit
spare. The NPCs are mobile and are engagingly quirky and surreal.
In most situations you are given only a handful of moves before
you die.  This would be alright except for the program's annoying
habit of returning you to the desktop every time you expire.  The
other irritating thing about "Apprentice" is that on my copy the
score system was bugged.  I started the game with 33 points and
whatever I did after that I still only had 33 points, so there was
no way of finding out how well I was doing.  (Or perhaps I was
just doing so badly that I didn't score a thing...I did save my
@+mouse from dying of thirst though!!!) ~(There are more points to
@~be scored but not until later in the game. Scoring in Apprentice
@~is worked out according to which objects are carried not
@~problem-solving - Sue)

"Apprentice" is an AGT adventure and therefore looks like most
other AGT games you may have seen in terms of text colour and
screen layout.

Despite my criticisms I enjoyed the little I have seen of this
game.  It is the kind of adventure which is frustrating and
addictive in about equal measure.  Perhaps a more
calm/brainy/patient (delete that which does not apply) adventurer
may get further than I did.  If you don't mind a hard game which
will keep you puzzling over it into the small hours then you will
probably like "Apprentice".