Lure of the Temptress (1992)

The game it´s great, but... feels too old, i mean, Beneath a Steel Sky still has a gameplay system than everyone actually can play without feeling "akward" and definitevily enjoy the game as a classic/modern point and click game. But Lure of Temptress sadly has too many "menu options" that in that time was considered freedoom and possibilities, But actually becomes in too much trial and error, with many boring menus one after each other. (At least in my opinion) A good game if you can cope with this, but for me it becomes one of this few old games that it´s actually bit boring.

This game hasn’t got much going for it. The graphics are passable, but nothing special. There‘s some nice enough music in it, but that’s really only played during the opening and the ending scenes. While playing you’ll only hear the same endless, mind-numbing "song" played over and over, to the point where I eventually turned off the sound. The story isn’t particulary interesting either. I did have a few chuckles while playing, mainly because some of the characters and jokes are genuinely funny. These moments are few and far between though. On top of that, the game is really short. It took me a good part of an afternoon to get through, and I guess experienced players of adventure games will breeze through it in a matter of hours. The one thing that’s really great about this game is that it’s free! So there’s really no reason not to pick it up. You probably won’t want to go out of your way to play it, but if you’ve got some time to kill and nothing else to do, this game is perfect!

I'm not a big fan of Adventure games, but I played this simply because it was rated above average and it was free. To be honest, it was a very tedious game. The character does not walk fast enough, I feel, and it is difficult to figure out what to do in many situations, not to mention that the ScummVM emulator included with the game downloaded straight from gog.com is not up-to-date enough so that you could get stuck at a point close to the ending. That being said, the story and character development was decent, and there were some interesting ideas in the game, I just felt like the mechanics could be better and that there could have been less fetching missions.

Great game, but the ScummVM that it is bundled with is buggy and makes the game hard to play. If you want to have good experience with it you should try it on DosBox, or even better would be to obtain Amiga version and play it on UAE. You can see how the game behaves in original version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxJLMsIDork There were reports to GOG about switching it to DosBox, but they were largely ignored, probably because the game is given away for free, so no one wants to waste their time with it.

Lure of the Temptress would be pretty good if it wasn't for so many annoying glitches. Text during dialogues often moves too fast and prevents you from fully grasping the story. Controls are good when you're alone but get terrible around NPCs. Movement is buggy as hell. Often when you want to talk to an NPC, instead of approaching him, your character will make 3 circles around the screen before finally giving up and you'll have to try the same thing from different angle hoping it will work this time. This game was revolutionary at it's time when it introduced NPCs that are living their lives, moving around the town and having conversations with each-other independent of the player. It may sound good but doesn't work so well because of already mentioned movement path problem that will result in characters bumping into one another, blocking and slowing you down or temporarily preventing you to do some action. Ratpouch, your sidekick integral to finishing the game, tends to get stuck at certain places and become invisible. While most of the quests make sense, a few of the puzzles seem very random and you'll probably need to look at walkthrough for these parts. I've seen a let's play video of the Amiga version and the game looks and sounds much better and doesn't have the movement problems so if you can, try to get the Amiga version.