Lure of the Temptress Amiga Game Review | Revolution Software's 1992 PC Adventure Game | Second Wind
59Lure of the Temptress Amiga adventure game review. Played on the Armiga emulation console.
Lure of the Temptress is a 1992 point and click PC adventure game by Revolution Software. This is the first PC game by Revolution Software, the company who would go on to make Beneath a Steel Sky and my favourite adventure PC game, Broken Sword. Our player character Diermot starts the game waking up in a dungeon cell. Before long, he’s broken out of prison and into the village of Turnvale. Turnvale has been taken over by the rampaging Skorl, who are all under the enchantment of the titular Temptress, Selena. So off he pops on his merry adventure to defeat Selena and free the town of Turnvale.
Lure of the Temptress game director Charles Cecil said he wanted Lure of the Temptress not to take itself too seriously, kind of a half-way house between the wackier Lucasarts stuff and the more serious Sierra PC games. And so what you get is a game which hops between tongue-in-cheek British humour and some pretty bleak themes, meeting in the middle with a bit of that gallows humour. Diermot is your usual dim-witted adventure game character with the rest of the cast made up of your expected fantasy tropes. Lure of the Temptress was made by four blokes in Hull, this is exactly what you’re gonna get from that.
The Amiga game Lure of the Temptress plays out in only a few areas. You’ve got the dungeon, the town of Turnvale and The King’s castle. Most of the game takes place in the village itself with areas of interest being few and far between. The village is padded out with corridor sections which makes the game longer than it should be. Worse yet, a lot of these padding sections use the same artwork, so it’s pretty easy to get lost or forget where you most of the time. Puzzles are thin on the ground, with most of the gameplay involving that Peter to Paul conceit. You know, talk to the trader to get the metal bar. Give the metal bar to the shopkeeper, get the gem. Give the gem to the bar wench, get the flask etc etc. so getting about the place is important and it gets annoying when you keep losing track of where you are. On top of that, Lure of the Temptress designers thought it would be super realistic to have all the NPCs in the game wander about of their own accord, which means you can never bloody find them when you want them. An ambitious idea for the time, but considering the game takes about five hours to complete, I reckon about half of that is wasted just roaming about the place looking for people. And I think the less said about the characters pathfinding, the better.
One feature in Lure of the Temptress PC game which is pretty cool is the ability to order other NPCs around. There’s a couple of times you’ll need to use this skill to solve puzzles, and you can chain up really complex combinations of commands. It’s a shame this isn’t fleshed out more, as I think that’s a USP that could have made for some really sophisticated gameplay.
Lure of the Temptress was released in 1992 for DOS PC, Amiga and the Atari ST, Despite tough competition from the big boys in PC adventure gaming, those four lads from Hull did alright. Lure of the Temptress went to the top of the PC game charts here in the UK, where is stayed for the rest of the year. A cracking start, from which Revolution would go from strength to strength.
Revolution released Lure of the Temptress as freeware in 2003. You can download it for PC from ScummVM.org or GOG free of charge. It’s a perfect candidate for Second Wind, which is about celebrating the past and showcasing great PC games that you might have missed. I’m actually playing the Amiga version of the game here, which is bundled with the Armiga Amiga emulation console.
*High concept: Worth a play for a few hours, on your phone.*
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