In most adventure games of 1992, the world stood still until the player walked into the room. Lure of the Temptress tried something else. In the town of Turnvale the blacksmith hammered at his anvil, left his shop, walked to the inn, bought a drink, talked to the barkeeper and went back to work, whether or not anyone was watching. PC Review found that “just strolling around the town of Turnvale… you really get the sense that everyone is leading their own little lives and that you are merely a passing visitor”. It was the first game from Revolution Software, a small company in Hull, and the system behind it, Virtual Theatre, carried Revolution on to Beneath a Steel Sky and Broken Sword.
Fast facts
- Developer: Revolution Software, founded in 1990 by Charles Cecil and others. The company was first registered as Turnvale Limited, after the game’s town.
- Publisher: Virgin Games, after Mirrorsoft, which had signed the game, collapsed.
- Released: 1992 for the Amiga (£30.99), PC (£35.99) and Atari ST.
- Engine: Virtual Theatre, written by Tony Warriner and David Sykes.
- Cost: two years and between £20,000 and £30,000, according to Retro Gamer.
- Now: free to download and play through ScummVM.
Diermot and the Skorl
The story is a fairy tale, and the reviewers said so. Diermot, a young man caught up in a battle between the king’s army and the Skorl, a race of brutish creatures, wakes in a cell. The Skorl have overrun Turnvale under the sorceress Selena, the temptress of the title. Diermot escapes with the help of Ratpouch, a fellow prisoner he frees from a rack in the torture chamber, and sets out to free the town. On the way he has to rescue Goewin, a troublemaker Selena has locked up, and make contact with Luthern, the blacksmith who leads the resistance.
Amiga Format’s Neil Jackson called the plot “predictable fairy-tale stuff” rescued by “a liberal dose of humour and self-parody”. PC Review liked Ratpouch best: his bad jokes and his attempts to get served in the pub were entertaining enough that “you can often just forget about playing the game, choosing instead to watch him at work”.
Virtual Theatre
Revolution designed the system first and wrote the story to fit it, PC Review explained, instead of the other way round. The town had more than 25 characters by Amiga Format’s count, and about 30 by The One’s. Each followed a route and a timetable, walked into shops and bars and chatted with the people there. When a speech bubble appeared over two characters, the player could stand nearby and read their conversation. A routine called autorouting let everyone step round each other instead of walking into a blocked path. The game held more than 2,000 separate pieces of character speech.
The most unusual feature was the Tell command. Some characters, Ratpouch above all, would carry out a chain of orders built from menus of verbs and nouns. Amiga Format gave the example of telling Ratpouch to “go to the Castle Gate and then ask the Skorl Guard for a potion and then return”. Off he would trot, and the player could watch him through a window. Later in the game, giving orders correctly became the key to several puzzles. Talking to people worked the same way: a right-click on a character offered Ask, Tell, Bribe, Talk to or Blah, and further menus built the sentence.
Virgin’s advertising made the most of it, asking whether players were “sick and tired of playing the same old, sterile, graphic adventure”.
How it was received
The reviewers liked the ambition more than the length. The One thought the game “every bit as professional and polished as anything the Americans and French have been able to offer us recently”, compared it most closely with Delphine’s Future Wars and Operation Stealth, and praised a British team that knew the Amiga well enough to keep disk swapping to a minimum. It found the tone “a little too serious and sombre”, and thought Lucasfilm’s characters more interesting. Amiga Format judged that it “surpasses almost anything Sierra have offered”, but said it could be finished in about four hours if you already knew the solution, and could not be installed on a hard disk.
PC Review recommended it as a first adventure, “an incredibly good advert for what this type of game can do. If only it did more”. Its reviewer had followed the blacksmith round the village and found him taking exactly the same route every time. There was no night or day, and hardly anyone had a home to go to, so the player could shadow a character all day without being asked why. The manual promised that gossip about Diermot would spread from person to person through the town, but the reviewer found little sign of it in the game.
From Mirrorsoft to Virgin
Cecil told Edge that Sean Brennan of Mirrorsoft had offered to back his new company, and that Mirrorsoft signed Lure of the Temptress. Revolution had started work on a second game, Beneath a Steel Sky, when Mirrorsoft collapsed with Robert Maxwell’s businesses at the end of 1991. Brennan went to work with Tim Chaney, the new managing director of Virgin Games, and Virgin took on Revolution’s games. The delay showed: PC Review remarked that the game had “looked like it was never actually going to appear”.
Free to play
By the end of 2003 Lure of the Temptress had joined the commercial games that Amiga Arena was giving away with their publishers’ agreement, alongside Beneath a Steel Sky. Total Amiga called it “a quality production and worth playing even if it isn’t quite up to the standards of Revolution’s later title”. Public accounts date Revolution’s freeware release to April 2003. The ScummVM project, which rewrites the engines of old adventure games so that they run on modern systems, now offers the game as a free download in five languages.
Sources
- The One, November 1991, pp. 48–49, “Staging a Revolution”: the Hull team and Virtual Theatre before release.
- Amiga Power issue 15, July 1992, p. 9: Virgin advertisement (“sterile, graphic adventure”; the Virtual Theatre system).
- Neil Jackson, review, Amiga Format issue 36, July 1992: £30.99; Diermot, Selena and the Skorl; more than 25 characters; Ask, Tell, Bribe, Talk to and Blah; Ratpouch’s orders; four hours; no hard disk install.
- Review, The One issue 46, July 1992: about 30 characters; comparison with Delphine; “a little too serious and sombre”.
- Review, PC Review issue 10, August 1992: £35.99; the plot and characters; autorouting; over 2,000 pieces of speech; the blacksmith’s routine; no day and night; the manual’s promise about gossip.
- ST Format issue 39, October 1992: readers’ solutions for the Atari ST version, and a mail-order price for it.
- David Crookes, “The Making of Broken Sword”, Retro Gamer issue 31, 2006, p. 60: Lure’s two years and £20,000–30,000; published for the Atari ST, PC and Amiga.
- Edge issue 137, June 2004, retrospective on Broken Sword: Charles Cecil on Sean Brennan, Mirrorsoft’s collapse and the move to Virgin.
- Robert Williams, review of the Amiga Arena Games Edition CD, Total Amiga issue 16, Winter 2003: Lure of the Temptress and Beneath a Steel Sky among games made freely available with their publishers’ agreement.
- Companies House, Revolution Software Limited, company 02484526 (web): incorporated as Turnvale Limited. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02484526
- Wikipedia, “Lure of the Temptress” (web, secondary): freeware release on 1 April 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lure_of_the_Temptress
- ScummVM, “Games” download page (web): Lure of the Temptress freeware in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. https://www.scummvm.org/games/