Lure of the Temptress

Lure of the Temptress is the debut work of British studio Revolution Software and one of the first truly ambitious European adventure games. Young blacksmith's apprentice Diermot ends up captured after a lost battle in the town of Turnvale, ruled over by the sorceress Selena and her deformed Skorl creatures. His task is to escape captivity, find allies among the townsfolk, and ultimately free the town — except movement is heavily restricted at first and guards lurk almost everywhere.

Its technical peculiarity is the Virtual Theatre engine, which the studio also used for its other games. The town's characters don't just stand around waiting to be clicked on — they walk their own routes, have their own jobs, and the player can ask them to go somewhere or do something. As a result the town feels like a living place rather than a gallery of static screens. The interface is a mouse-driven context menu supplemented with text commands for ordering characters around, which feels a bit clunky today but felt very forward-thinking at the time.

On DOS the game ran in 256 colors with honestly hand-drawn backgrounds and a soundtrack that leans toward a grim medieval mood rather than a memorable melody. The atmosphere of an occupied town feels unusually tight, and the game doesn't play at comedy the way its American competitors did. At the time it was received well, though overshadowed by the big American titles, and above all it paved the way for the far more famous Beneath a Steel Sky. Today Lure of the Temptress is more historically interesting than comfortable — the pace is slow and the controls get in the way — but the idea of characters with lives of their own was years ahead of its time. The puzzles themselves are fairly classic — gathering items, conversations, and finding a way past the guards — but combined with characters living out their own lives, they take on a different flavor than the competition's. The best way to approach this game is as a historical document: whoever survives the first hour gets a tight fantasy adventure with a personality of its own and an ending worth reaching.