Lure of the Temptress: the virtual theatre that came before Broken Sword

Turnvale was the first setting where Revolution Software let the supporting cast live on their own onscreen — and some of the people who played it never quite decided whether that helps or gets in the way.

Turnvale waits for no one

The people of Turnvale keep their own routines: they cross the street, strike up conversations with one another and go about their business onscreen without waiting for you to turn up. This is what the store christened Virtual Theatre, the system Revolution Software debuted here, in the first title of a lineage built on the idea that the world carries on living whether the player is in it or not. It was the start of the studio that would later put its name to the Broken Sword series.

As Diermot, a young peasant pressed into service as a beater for the royal hunt, you step onstage when a band of mercenary warriors — in the pay of a figure no one in the realm can identify, the Temptress of the title herself — reaches Turnvale and shatters its peace. Everything is handled with the click of a mouse: move, talk, search and fight your way through more than sixty hand-painted scenes and more than twenty-five characters. One of them, the apprentice Ratpouch, becomes almost constant company: you can give him orders and use him to crack puzzles that won't yield to one person alone.

The store sums up the result as an absorbing story set in a dark medieval age, with the deliberately old-fashioned feel of a classic point-and-click adventure — and it is that same self-directed cast which opens the game that later splits the reviews, between those who delight in the characters' lives of their own and those who just wanted them out of the way.

The affection outlives the broken emulator

Those who first arrived in Turnvale in 2009 described the story as well told and the characters as endearing, with graphics that still impressed for their time. Those who came back later, in 2022, called the game a classic and admitted that the logic of its puzzles holds up even to modern eyes — remarkable for something designed to fit on a handful of floppy disks.

One player who found it on the Atari ST, back when it was new, calls it his first adventure game — and says he holds a fondness for it that no other title in the genre has matched, even after waiting years for a sequel that never came.

The praise, though, almost always arrives with the same complaint: the supporting characters bump into you the whole time. Ratpouch, the apprentice who follows Diermot for nearly the entire game, is the chief culprit — he jostles you, wanders off, walks across the screen on his own, and the conversation you were trying to start gets cut off halfway through. One player who returned to the game in 2021 tried to separate the two things: he praises the adventure itself and blames the version the store hands out — for him the trouble lies in the built-in ScummVM emulator, which breaks the very routing system that is supposed to send the characters wandering freely through the town.

The measuring stick is the studio itself

The person who wrote in 2009 and the one who came back in 2012 make the same comparison, each in their own way: set beside Beneath a Steel Sky — Revolution Software's next game — Lure of the Temptress feels raw. Both point to the same irritation, a glut of menu options that turns a simple action into trial and error, with hints that don't tell you which way to go.

Two others voice the same weariness from different angles: one, in 2010, complains about the soundtrack that loops until you switch it off and jokes that are good but few and far between; another, in 2011, describes the visuals as functional, with no pretence of art, and the command-driven design as the plain inheritance of the text games that came before. Neither denies the problem that also crops up among those who liked it: the characters bump into one another right in front of you, and you stand there waiting for the path to clear.

The harshest verdict, published in 2009, comes from someone who finished the game anyway: they hit a bug that jams the ending under ScummVM, found no fix that worked and watched the closing minutes on video, outside the game itself. The recommendation left over is blunt: it's worth it for anyone who has already decided they must complete every classic in the genre — not for anyone who just wants a good point-and-click story.

It's for those who want to see the sketch before the finished painting

Lure of the Temptress is for those who want to see the sketch before the finished painting: the moment when Revolution Software first tried out letting the world live without asking the player's leave — an idea the studio itself would go on to refine in Broken Sword. It's material for those with patience for an old menu, for puzzles that inch forward through trial and error, and for a supporting character who walks across the screen without warning.

Anyone after a polished point-and-click, free of technical stumbles, will run first into the very obstacle that shows up on both sides of the reviews — literally: the companion who blocks the scene right in front of you. What Turnvale demands of anyone who steps in is patience with Ratpouch, from the first collision to the last.