Lure of the Temptress screenshot (RTX 3080 Ti)

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   atomicpoet (atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Oct-2024 17:34:20 JST atomicpoet

   You know I have to admit that there are certain beloved games that don’t appeal to me. Lure of the Temptress is one of them.

   Yes, yes, I see the appeal. The art style is cool, it has a nice story, and I totally enjoy watching someone else bang their head against it.

   But for me to play it myself? Hard pass.

   My first beef with this game is that it’s just too easy to not see objects. In the opening scene there’s a knife in the dungeon. You wouldn’t know that because it’s so hard to see that it might as well be in the witness protection program. Miss it, and congrats. You’re not getting out of the dungeon. Enjoy your stay.

   And that leads my to another frustration. This game is simply too linear for my liking. You have to do everything in order, like a recipe – except there’s no delicious meal. There are no creative solutions here, no room for improvisation. There’s only one path, and it’s become overgrown with weeds.

   All this would be forgivable if the commands were a little more flexible. However, they seem too arcane for my liking, almost like mystical incantations. It expects you to find the right verb-noun combination, and if you don’t know it, it practically stares blankly at you – wondering why you haven’t figured it out.

   But isn’t this just the way of DOS adventure games back in the day? Not always.

   I enjoy the likes of The Secret of Monkey Island. It had a certain levity that made the problem solving worth it. And Flight of the Amazon Queen felt interactive enough to feel like a game and not just fighting with menus.

   But Lure of the Temptress just leaves me cold.

   Part of the problem is that the controls just haven’t aged well. Often when I’m trying to go one place, the game goes, “Nah, how about you bump into a stranger instead?”. The conversations with NPCs are rough – I’d rather talk to my toaster instead.

   What makes the whole thing more frustrating is that there’s very little in the way of a soundtrack, and the sound effects are sparse. I can’t even nod my head to some tunes while solving puzzles. All I got to hear is the sound of my dwindling patience.

   The story does interest me. But I think I’d rather just watch a YouTube playthrough than suffer through this myself.

   Maybe hardcore adventure fans will like. For the rest of us? Thank you, but nope.