Apprentice

About

Apprentice tasks you with toppling the fire-breathing dragon Fumo to earn your magic credentials. This 1990 platformer from Rainbow Arts has you navigating 17 side-scrolling levels, each with distinct elemental themes from volcanic hells to cloud-filled heavens. You kick boxes to smash enemies, collect coins to buy upgrades, and gather leaves that tweak gravity to boost jumps or hover longer. Balloons help you float vertically while fruit and extra lives litter the stages, many of which hide bonus areas. The Amiga and Atari ST version blends platforming with resource management, requiring you to balance combat, exploration, and spending. The game’s pixel art leans toward cartoonish with bright, console-style visuals that pop on older systems. Community ratings on classic gaming sites average around 4/5, praising the gravity mechanics and the challenge of tracking down every secret. Shops appear regularly, letting you turn collected cash into tools that ease later levels. While the premise is simple, the mix of physics-based tricks and elemental level design keeps the action fresh across its 17 stages.