Sunday Musings - Lure of the Temptress
Throughout 2024, I'm planning to look at some Warhammer-adjacent material that is of interest. To me at least. If you don't like it, I'll happily help people write articles for the site without a second thought. In this case though, you are going to have to put up with me talking about early 90s Point and Click games. If you are new to the Sunday Musings, the premise here is that I have an idea of an article related to Warhammer(ish) and a hour to write it in. With all that being said:
"When coming up with the title "Lure Of The Temptress" we ran into 2 problems: Firstly there wasn't any luring and secondly there was no temptress.. So naturally we reverse engineered the entire game."
– Charles Cecil - Revolution Software
Lure of the Temptress was released in 1992, and was the first use of the Virtual Theatre graphics engine, which allowed sprites to "wander about" doing pre-scripted tasks and random movements as a way to give a game a bit more life and movement. Created be Revolution Software, the engine was used to create Beneath A Steel Sky and the first Broken Sword game.
The tale of the game is fairly by the numbers, with an evil rising that needs to be vanquished, and you, the unlikly hero, must take battle to the Temptress. However, the journey is one that is filled to the brim with character and some of the most beautiful screens of the era. Every NPC is interactive throughout the game, and this leads to some genuinely unsettling or laugh out loud moments. The ability to order or threaten NPCs to get what you need to progress brings a certain amount of fun to a very straightforward adventure. You can see the bones of Steel Sky here.
Lure.. has little in the way of music, with in-world sound effects filling the world. We do get a banger of a opening track to get into the feel of the game but that is about it, which is surprising in a game that takes about 3 and a half hours to speedrun.
While Lucasarts is (possibly rightfully) classed as the king of Point and Click genre, York's Revolution Software have to take my personal crown. As much as I loved Monkey Island, Lure.. and Steel Sky are masterclasses in world building through atmosphere and character. Not a single pixel is wasted in making these worlds breathe. Lure.. exhales a sensation of familiarity, a whiff of the 80s fantasy that the UK managed to capture that has never been equalled. It's dirty yet inviting. It's primitive and yet allows you to imagine the world outside the screen's borders. The only time in more modern gaming such a feeling existed but in the original Fable (I realise how old that game is now). It has moments of absolute frustration (what Point and Click didn't) but as a whole, it's a bath to sink into of a time when games were to be played, not just sold.
