Lure of the Temptress (1992)

We all know who the big names in the adventure games history are. First we have Ron ‘Monkey Island’ Gilbert and his mischievously hilarious and legendary pirate saga, and Roberta Williams’ majestic King’s Bounty series. Then come all the other Lucas Arts’ classics apart from Monkey Island, games like Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, all being highly influential, enormously popular titles, part of the genre’s finest. But there are always those, destined to stay behind the shadow of the Great Ones. Games like Revolution’s Broken Sword series, not lacking anything in quality compared to the competition, but still not getting the same mainstream success. And then there are the hidden gems. Like Lure of the Temptress. Revolution’s first game plays an important part in the shaping of the adventure games genre mostly because of one of its aspects – its innovative way of treating NPCs(non-player characters) for the time it was released(1992). The computer controlled characters, unlike in all the previously released point-and-click quests, act as if they are actually living their lives, walking around and talking to each other. Sounds good on paper, but the truth is it actually doesn’t work as good in game. You will find yourself spending minutes just walking around the streets of the fictional village of Turnvale, looking for a blacksmith that has gone who-knows-where. It adds to the authentic experience of the game with the different characters not waiting for you in one place just to talk to them, but seemingly being alive, but in the same time it doesn’t really add much to the gameplay. Pointless clicking from screen to screen looking for someone isn’t exactly entertainment. The other issue with the system is not as annoying, but can prove to be very distracting. Example: you are making a meaningful conversation with a drunk about the fate of a girl that has disappeared from the village, and your rich dialogue gets constantly interrupted by your under-aged companion’s attempts to get a beer from the inn keeper. Nevertheless, the whole thing has its good sides. On a number of occasions you will find yourself just standing in one place and observing the hilarious conversations made between the NPCs. Or the way some of the puzzles are meant to be solved – by giving orders to other characters. Apart from the interesting integrated NPCs system, there isn’t much about the game. The quests are fairly typical and not very challenging to solve, there is little to no music accompanying you throughout the game, and the plot is more or less entertaining. Lure of the Temptress probably won’t be as thrilling for first-timers in the genre as a Monkey Island game would be, but still it has its pluses: it’s short, it has all the quest basics in it, and most importantly, it’s free.

I remember playing this game when it was first released and how innovative it was for it's time. Other games have built on it's foundations, which may be why some aspects of it don't resonante with everyone. It's a good puzzle game - progression is logical even if difficult from a modern perspective. I'm not sure what people expect from a game that was made to fit on few 1.44MB floppy disks. I'd love to see a remake of the game to flesh out the world and story, but it still has a lot to show within the confines of the technology at the time it was made.

What comes to your mind when you hear the title? Mystery, fatal attraction... all that stuff. Well, you'll be glad to know that there is NONE of that here. This is what happens when you start off with a good idea and realize that you have no clue how to implement it. All this game has to offer is a bunch of mini fetch quests with characters who act as stumbling blocks rather than any type of help. While the fact that you can have expanded dialogue options like offering a bribe to people for information or gaining their trust through a third party is interesting, this aspect is used exactly once in the entire game. Why have a major option like that if you are going to use it ONCE? The pathfinding is BAD. There is no general sense of direction other than "Selena bad. Kill Selena." This is not helped by the fact that important characters run around like rodents all over the map in semipredictable patterns and occasionally get stuck between screens, thereby becoming inaccessible. This can become frustrating when you are looking for someone to hand in a quest item or whatever. In that sense, fetchquests have SUB-fetchquests. SOUNDS GREAT HUH? The dialogue system between NPCs is HORRENDOUS. The game's story does not go anywhere, really. When it ends, it just halts. Just stops, like that. You get introduced to a conspiracy late in the game, but really, it's just because the game makers had no idea how to step up a final showdown. You get dropped off at the bad guy's place and fool around for few minutes or so then BAM. Game ends. No bad guy speech. No close encounter. Nothing, You get a screen of text chronicling the end of the story. THE END. Really, this looks like a college level game design project. Even under lenient circumstances such as that, I would give a B-.

NOTE: This review is for the DOS version, included with the download off of the ScummVM website but not available here. The ScummVM download includes the DOS version as well as both the VGA and the EGA versions to try on ScummVM. Unfortunately, the VGA ScummVM version, both the ones I tried off of GOG and ScummVM's website, is virtually unplayable for me. The controls are almost completely broken, such as when I point to an area for my character to move to or interact with he will often not go there, even when a clear path is in place, but rather meander about side to side, in a circle, then come to a complete stop in the middle away from where I actually want him to go. Other times with Ratpouch standing there I will try to move out of the way but my character will be frozen in place with the cursor flickering with every click and Ratpouch repeatedly and annoyingly exclaiming "Excuse me sir!" I could not find reports of anyone else having these particular problems so I just gave up playing this version and tried the DOS version which thankfully was actually PLAYABLE this time, the (many) annoyances, for which I will get to shortly, being nothing of the game-breaking sort. Differences between the DOS and ScummVM versions otherwise are minor, just different samples for the extremely minimal sound effects and music. There is also the EGA version which is the same game as far I know but is graphically more hideous, with really awful textures and colors (and I like the look of some EGA titles so it is not for a bias against it, a lot of the late-80's/early-90's Sierra titles for instance look quite good for their time and retain quite a bit of charm to them). Anyway, as the intro starts, we see the recountings of a simple peasant who accidentally gets caught up with the King's Guard against the nefarious Skorl, a kind of orc/troll/goblin-ish race of creatures led by the demon-possessed enchantress Selena, slaughtering the king and his guards and leaving you captured and imprisoned. Now's your opportunity to break free and defeat Selena and release her iron grip upon the land. Plot doesn't get more complex than that, not that it really has to. For a game as short as it is, there's not much room for narrative depth, rather, you must solve what are mostly basic inventory puzzles to reach your final destination. This is the debut game of Revolution Studios, known better for Beneath a Steel Sky and the Broken Sword games, and the amateurishness sadly wears through in every facet. I feel bad for those who had to pay full price for this back in the day, the only consolation being that it would fund a studio who would go on to make far greater efforts. First, the interface. While you do get used to it after a bit of play it's still pretty cumbersome. Completing many actions requires cycling through various menus and submenus to select various actions and objects, a carry-over from the text parser days minus the quick intuitiveness of an actual text parser (though not having to run through a series of verb-and-noun hunting hoops to find the one particular command the game will accept in a game like this is probably for the better). Another aspect of this is being able to give secondary NPC companions commands varying in their complexity, an interesting element but inefficiently utilized. Two tasks require you to command your initial companion Ratpouch to accomplish but are tasks that you reasonably could have done yourself, if not better and only cannot for no other reason than contrivance (one involves pushing down a brick wall, something your far more fit and in better shape main character would seem to be more capable of doing than the boyish, sickly, just-released-from-torture-rack Ratpouch). Another one is a bit of tacked-on cooperation to get a stuck drawbridge going, and another, by far the most creative one (and the only bit of remotely worthwhile puzzle-solving in the game), requires you to command a lady to go pull switches in a cavern to open certain doors which in turn close others. This is offset by said lady character's opposition to any sort of teamwork by whining and complaining whenever given a command (even though actually GETTING THROUGH THE CAVERN requires some cooperation on her part, something she is unwilling to do on her own otherwise) making her an unlikable dolt pretty fast. The controls themselves are fine but lots of annoying snags can get in the way. Trying to enter through a doorway when another character is just coming through, making your character walk around to stand out of the way and then back is one such thing. Another is trying to speak to a character when yours in not in the proper pre-programmed position (usually because another character is moving about in that exact place) making you have to do it again. And if a character is standing within a doorway there's no way to be able to speak to them (the cursor only indicates the door and not the person standing in front of it) until they actually move away from the door. Cycling through dialogue boxes is also a bit of a chore, especially when the screen is taken up by conversations going on between other characters. Which leads to the one other interesting idea that also is not very well-implemented here, the much-touted "Virtual Theatre" system, in which NPCs go on about their own business with their own interactions with the world. What this really means is that NPCs will move about in every which direction, characters you often need to speak to and thus have to track down, running in circles around town just to find them, which is a bit of an annoyance. Occasionally you can find them in a bar or a shopkeep having an amusing conversation but otherwise it comes across as little more than a gimmick that adds nothing to the experience besides a bit of superficial "realism." As for the game's other aspects, there are the puzzles, which largely involve finding the right inventory item to interact with the right person or object or simply talking to certain people at the right times. A lot of trial and error is involved unless you use a guide, though it's not as bad as it was in, say, Teenagent. There is some semblance of logic and direction here though the solutions to some problems are pretty arbitrary (like the one character who randomly gives you a diary containing the solution to one puzzle). Some pixel hunting is involved, pixels that don't even show up unless you first "look" at the object containing said pixel or accomplish some other vaguely related event trigger. One such egregious one involves where to look for a "cowbane," a kind of flower needed for a potion. Though as I said before there is one somewhat well-thought-out non-inventory puzzle involving a cavern and getting another character to pull switches in the other room but this is one exception. In addition to these there are two tacked-on combat sequences that are frustrating to control and are reduced to furious button mashing (or, er, mouse clicking in this case) to win. Disappointingly, the final confrontation is resolved with a cutscene with no interaction on your part, although it doubtfully would involve much besides another dig through the inventory anyway. The worst one of all though would doubtlessly go to needing to reset the game entirely just for one item to appear, supposedly a bit of copy protection that doesn't show up at all in the manual nor is mentioned in any FAQ (not even Revolution's own damn hint guide!) except for one, and another obscure link I came across mentioning it. Really, completely unnecessary, and the lack of documentation of something as crucial to mention as this is also utterly baffling. The audiovisual presentation is a mixed bag. On the visual end, there are some nice cutscenes with limited animation and the in-game graphics themselves are nicely detailed and such. Problem is how dark and murky everything is, and though I suspect it keeps with the dungeon-esque dark medieval setting it would be nice to be able to see the skies or sun sometime. As for the sounds, well, uhh... the music during the cutscenes is actually fairly well-done which makes the sounds during gameplay all the more baffling. Simply put, the sounds/music here are terrible. They seem to try to replicate things like fire burning, water dripping, bells ringing, rocking chairs rocking, etc. but not only do they not even sound remotely like what they try to imitate but they are the most obnoxious, repetitive, grating sounds possible, sounding rather like a toddler pressing two keys interchangably on a really crappy Casio keyboard. Otherwise the sound is minimal to nonexistant at best so you will not likely miss much by turning the sound off here. If I can say anything good about this is that, though the plot is threadbare and cliched at best, there is some definite dry wit to the writing that really gives some of the inhabitants here some character and a much-needed element of humor. Ratpouch's pleading for a drink of ale despite being too young, the gruff and simple-minded barbarian's musings, Luthern's ill-thought plans of revolt, there are some definite funny moments here. Not enough to make this something I'd recommend playing unless you want to see the leap in quality Revolution made from this to Beneath a Steel Sky (also a free game here I'd recommend playing instead). I suppose it's short enough, but that's another one of its problems, it feels like a quickie demo for all the ideas the studio had that they'd make better use of later on, it lacks much meat to chew on and what meat is there is barely above old-Lunchable-bologna quality. Honestly, giving two stars to this is pretty generous, but it's not a totally botched abomination of gaming and it has some scant redeeming elements so I'd prefer to reserve the one star rating for something truly terrible (if this were a review of the ScummVM version then maybe...) but on the whole this feels just like one big (well, small) nothing of a game that's also really clunky to get through, and it's just not worth it despite the enticing price tag.

The characters are well defined, the graphics are overall pleasant and it has some very ambitious simulation mechanics for it's time, but the gameplay is just bad. First thing to mention - the pathfinding algorithm is utter trash, probably the worst I've ever witnessed. Most of gameplay time is you waiting for your character to stroll around the room before finally deciding to obey you, waiting for other characters to get unstuck so that you can interact with them, waiting because your characters randomly walks away from the room you told him to get to. This is a gigantic flaw that constantly plagues the game and slows it down to a crawl, makes you wonder if every action you want to do is really worth the effort. The puzzles are badly designed. At first they are reasonable, but after a while you start having no clue about what to do and you have to start talking to complete random people that will unreasonably let you progress with the story. There's a couple of pixel hunting puzzles that, again, make no sense (cowbane I'm (also) looking at you). All of this, keep in mind, while the pathfinder slows down every interaction. The only real reason I think this is a two star game is for the very complex sim mechanics which, for it's time, where very, very ambitious, and I think they're the only reason I suggest at least trying out this one. Chracters walk around the world, you can give instructions to your follower, the interaction system seems like Maniac Mansion on steroids. But... it's barely used in gameplay, which is a big question mark from me. You can "ask" people for items but it's never, ever used in puzzles (except for asking items back from your follower) and only once the follower instructions are actively used in a puzzle (no, pushing a brick doesn't count in my book). I won't lie, I broke a promise I made back in the early 2000s to never complete a game following a walkthrough, but I just couldn't handle the late game crawling around.