Lure of the Temptress (1992)

It's an early work from Revolution an you can tell. It's feels more like a text adventure than a point&click. The interfase is uncomfortable and you get forced too often to try every single posible action to go ahead with the game. You don't get enough clues to guess what to do.

I love retro games, but this is like pulling teeth...

What could have been a nice little adventure game was ruined by technical issues. The pathfinding is broken. Often I would tell my character to exit the area or talk to someone, and he would go in the opposite direction, circle around for 10 seconds and then do nothing. Now add the "virtual theater" concept, where NPCs wander around freely, and you often get 3 to 5 characters bumping into each other on the screen and getting stuck. The other problem with all this is that the game is limited by one dialog box, so if you start a conversation and some other NPCs start their own conversation those conversations will get mixed. Sometimes the text displays very fast and you miss things which can be important for some puzzles. So, is there anything good about it ? Even without these issues, at best, it would be an average game. The graphics and the story are OK, and all the objects have short descriptions, but nothing special or original. There are not many sound effects in the game, and only the intro and outro scenes have music. The puzzles are not very creative or hard, but have a high potential to get you stuck. I managed to finish the game without any help, but it was mostly luck and the fact the game world is very small, so I could recheck everything quickly. There are some fun jokes and characters in the game, and conversations between them are fun to watch, but it is hard to laugh after you get frustrated with all the issues I listed above. It is a hard one to recommend, so I will use this chance to recommend Flight Of The Amazon Queen and Beneath A Steel Sky, which are also free on GOG and are much better adventure games in every way.

I usually do not play point'n'click adventure games but this was added to my account for free, so I gave it a try. I had no problems with the graphic but the sound and music were really... functional. Since I am not an adventure game expert I had to use a walkthrough and I cannot decide whether it is hard or not by adventure game standards but some of the puzzles seemed pretty illogical even for me. However, my biggest problem is that this release is full of bugs and I was "lucky" enough to reproduce several of them. I even had to restart the game once, because one of the NPCs I had to interact with was "stuck" between two screens. Despite this, the game can be completed in just one afternoon and I've really enjoyed it - but if you are an expert of adventure games, you may easily find it otherwise.

I remember when this game came out, for the time it was a pretty fantastic game, now of course it seems clunky and a little slow to our eyes. However if you're looking for a bite size piece of entertainment then this game is absolutely perfect, the difficulty is just right, not so hard it becomes boring and repetitive, nor so easy it's just plain dull. I highly recommend getting this game, especially since it's free!