Apprentice

Baf's Guide

Fantasy with a slight mideastern flavor. To complete your apprenticeship and become a full Magician, all you have to do is reach the Guild Hall with the items given to you at the beginning of the game. Although this in itself is not trivial, there are several more tasks you can perform along the way to increase your status in the Guild: perform magic, recover artifacts, etc. Lots of plot branching and multiple solutions. Suffers from a deadly bottleneck at the very start, plus of course the usual AGT ills.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt

SynTax
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. (Matthew Pegg)
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SynTax
The puzzles are few and far between and tend to fall into two categories. Either you can play "guess the input" or you find yourself carrying out the instructions of other characters in the game. [...] The author seems to have enjoyed writing the game and the world is fairly believable. (Steve Clay)

There are a maximum of 83 points to score and some people may be confused by the fact that they start off with 33 points! [...] The first time I finished the game I had just 3 points! In fact, there are many ways to complete the game, not all of which are satisfactory in terms of what you have achieved. You need not complete all the Wizard's suggested tasks to win. But this means that a game which would normally been relegated to the disk box after being played once can be replayed numerous times in order to try all the routes and opportunities open to you - if you want to, that is! (Sue)
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