Lure of the Temptress (1992)

Lure of the Temptress is a short high-fantasy game which is best played at times when you don't have anything else to play and you REALLY don't want to be doing anything constructive, like exercising. WARNING: MINUTE SPOILERS AHEAD. VISUALS; 4/5: The backgrounds are good, and the cutscenes are generally also good, and the characters in the story are great at looking like what they represent; a weaselly, conniving thief, a fair young maiden, a fat friar, and so forth. However, the game isn't particularly advanced in the animations department, and while the graphics are generally okay to look at, they aren't particularly memorable or special. SOUNDS; 2/5: There is good music in the cutscenes, otherwise this would get a score of 1. Outside of the cutscenes, there is no music at all, and all the sounds are restricted to MIDI pitches, which are just bad enough in places to make me think that the game would sound better if it were totally silent. WRITING/STORY; 4/5: All-around good. Yes, it's cliched high fantasy, but that doesn't make it bad; Ratpouch in particular is an entertaining fellow. The story also has a pretty good flow to it. The only flaw in the game's story is the ending, which is disappointing in a number of ways. GAMEPLAY; 3/5: The interface is a little clunky, particularly when you're asking a henchman-character to do something for you. It's not bad, though. More serious is the fact that, while your character's primary goals are always clear, the little sidequests you need to complete in order to achieve those goals are frequently not. Also, if you make a mistake that would prevent you from winning the game, but which doesn't actually kill your character, you are never given any hint that you screwed up. On the plus side, this game Doesn't suffer too badly from "Featureless Blob Syndrome," an ailment common to older adventure games which is characterized by an inability to distinguish important objects environment from the background. VALUE FOR PRICE/OVERALL; 3/5: This game is free. If it cost more than five USD, I would adivse you not to go for it, but for online freeware, it's pretty good.

5 stars for the game: This is a brilliant adventure game in which the world is immersive and alive: the NPCs in the town have a daily routine, you can give complex orders to your companion, etc. 0 stars for ScummVM: 1) Broken pathfinding: The game got many bad reviews on GoG simply because every time there are several NPCs you have to wait 6 to 10 times longer until they get out of your way and go to their destination. This issue doesn't exist in the DOS version! 2) Background dialogue between NPCs gets in the way of main dialogue and may also cause dangerous desynchronized waiting loops which also doesn't happen in the original, especially in the taverns. 3) Problem 1) and 2) piled up until I got stuck in a state in which I can no longer click on characters to talk to them (doesn't happen in the original!). 4) There are also strings mentioning one object that are wrongly triggered for all objects which - you guessed it - doesn't happen in the original. 5) The sound here is abysmal (in the DOSBox version it can be fixed by forcing Sound Blaster in the Dosbox config file.) The Amiga version of the game has even better sound which is also possible to pull off in Dosbox but it's too much trouble to set up. But I'd expect better from ScummVM's port team. So - I had to finally find the abandonware DOS version and run it in DOSBox. It didn't have these bugs but had other issues - in the dos version an item (the tinderbox) disappears (as a punishment for "pirating" the game), so as soon as you start the game you have to restart it so that the item shows up in the village. Once I did this I finally got the experience of the original Lure Of The Temptress. Thank God for the abandonware sites. So yes, play the Dosbox version. The ScummVM version here is slower, more tedious, prone to showstopper bugs, and unpleasant to play in a way that it is NOT in DOS and people wrongly believe that this is how it was shipped back then. It's doing it a great disservice.

L.o.t.T. is the first game I've completed here on GoG. Sort of. (There's a game-breaking glitch at the very very very end of the game through SCUMMVM. There are ways to fix it...but I couldn't get it to work. I ended up just watched the last 5 minutes on YouTube.) It's...meh. An interesting game more than historical reasons, as stated by others. Can be completed very quickly. I had to glance at a guide once or twice (or a billion times once I got stuck at the end.) You probably will, like I did, spend a lot of time just staring at your characters bump into one another, then separate by slowly walking to opposite ends of the screen. Doesn't hold a candle to Beneath a Steel Sky and the Broken Sword games. Truly: Skip this game unless you absolutely have to play all adventure games of this sort. Who cares if it's free? It's a waste of time. 40%

I've played Lure of the Temptress long years ago, but it was one of the selected few that kept me returning on them to finish. Together with the Indiana and Monkey Island series, Lure of the Temptress is a fun voyage, easy enough but also, hard enough to keep you entrhilled until you manage to finish it.