Game Details Developer: N-Fusion Interactive

Publisher: Replay Games

Platform: Windows (reviewed), Mac, Linux, iOS, Android

Release Date: June 27, 2013

Price: $19.99

Links: Official website N-Fusion Interactive: Replay Games: Windows (reviewed), Mac, Linux, iOS, AndroidJune 27, 2013: $19.99

Fourteen months ago, unicorns and fairy dust still fueled the Kickstarter world. Major failures were rare and no Zach Braffs had arrived on the scene to kick up dust and make us cough; the place was mostly little-engines-who-could, promising the best of our old favorites along with a few cool new surprises.

And then Al Lowe showed up to stink up the joint.

I'm just kidding, of course. Kickstarter held up just fine after the creator of Leisure Suit Larry arrived to beg for our bucks. $655,000 and 14 months later, the horny fruits of his team's labor have arrived: Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded, a 1080p reimagining of the decidedly sophomoric 1987 MS-DOS adventure game/farcical sex comedy. It's the latest in a recent line of point-and-click refreshes, but unlike similar modern takes on the Broken Sword and Monkey Island series, Lowe and company promised a bottom-to-top redo—or at least a re-groping-and-fondling—of the original game.

That promise may have left buyers expecting a more substantive remake, but the juvenile purists who rushed to kickstart this retread will come away much like Larry does in his adventures—all too briefly satisfied and nursing a sleazy aftertaste.

One thing that didn't receive a touch-up was the game's straight-to-sleaze intro. “You've got the looks, the lines, and the leisure suit,” the game's sarcastic narrator quips upon Larry's arrival in the city of "Lost Wages" (yuk yuk, and you better believe the yuks keep coming). Before you know it, you're off to find true love—or the early '80s, women's-lib-hating approximation thereof—with no other declared purpose.

Unlike the original game's reliance on typing in responses to text prompts (which were often just flat-out guesses, at least in my case), LSLR employs the series' later-introduced, just-click mechanic, having players switch between actions like look, talk, touch, dig into inventory, taste/smell (eesh) and unzip (double eesh). The latter two mostly result in oddball reactions from Lost Wages' drunk-and-dreary cast, a few of whom come courtesy of Kickstarter “be in the game” donations.

If you've played the original LSL or its later VGA remake, prepare for an all-too-familiar road to ruin. The game world is made up of mostly the same locations, the same characters, and the same puzzles. It even has the same obnoxious in-game money issues; you'll need to rack up cash to get through a few sequences, and the only way to get it is to save your game, gamble, and reload your save until you actually strike it big on slots or blackjack. This, along with a few illogical mouse-click moments, are the only things that extend the game past its incredibly thin length of a couple of hours.

The 1080p presentation is pleasant enough, especially since the series hasn't gotten this kind of high-res treatment in years. Most of the computer-friendly series launched from the CRT era, after all, and while the game's animation isn't much to shout about, its seedy locales and ridiculously inhuman ladies certainly come with more color and detail than you might expect for a relatively low-earning Kickstarter.

The most obvious changes in this remake come via the script, which has seen practically every portion touched up beyond the '87 original. The game now overflows with jokes that are at worst utter groaners and at best pretty sharp, and the additions can easily double the game's length if you're willing to hunt for every bit of new narration, dialogue, and reaction to Larry's buffoonery. For example, an entire wall of bathroom graffiti has been refreshed with new quips, leaving room for gems like “There are two kinds of people in this world: people who can extrapolate from incomplete data.” See, it's not all butts and boobs! (though judging on my playthrough, it's still about 92 percent butts and boobs.)

Unfortunately, the game's puzzles haven't seen any similar tweaks or additions. The best gameplay bits from the 1982 original were send-ups of adventure game conventions at the time. For example, one moment from the original game asked you to repeatedly change the channel on a TV. There's no challenge to it; it's just a vehicle to deliver a set of silly, TV-related jokes and a way to poke fun at the way adventure games often buried text in a non-challenging way.

You can't bring back LSL back without that moment (or its gaudily dressed pimp), yet whether you've played the original or not, the whole sequence lacks the same punch in the remaster. This might be because the creators didn't bother refreshing the material for a modern audience; jokes about Ross Perot Sr.'s 1992 Presidential run are not quite as topical as they once were.

When the puzzles have been changed, it's often without any apparent purpose behind the differences. An early puzzle set in a pub bathroom now has the same conclusion as last time, only now you have to click slightly to the left of the original solution spot to get there. That's about the extent of the game's "revamped" puzzles, so the game's smarts never come from the wide-eyed fun of figuring out a puzzle. That's no shocker, since the original LSL was rarely known for such aha moments, especially if they would get in the way of yuk-yuk descriptions and one-liners. Still, it's disappointing that a so-called reloading couldn't add some more life to the tired puzzles.

Fans will appreciate that LSL's raunchy roots still waver in gender-norm limbo. This is no land of feminist enlightenment, and it's definitely not the finest welcoming wagon for girls or women hoping to identify with a game's protagonist. Yet LSL still retains a general sense of mocking toward its lecherous protagonist and his one-track "get the chick" purpose. The game's humor is at its best when reveling in self-awareness, when it equates the heartless pursuit of one-night stands with the foolishness of treating life like a video game. To be fair, though, mocking Larry for having a small penis doesn't exactly balance the scales for the game's heavy objectification of women.

But this is meant to be a return to a mid-'80s era in which Larry's pixellated raunchiness could amuse, titillate, and offend in equal measure. So, you know, bring on the ability to click "talk" on a pair of breasts, or to expose yourself to a man wearing only a barrel, or to find creative uses for a whale's blowhole. The puzzles still underwhelm, but anyone with the proclivity to search for raunchy, silly text, will maximize the Leisure.

The Good

Keep on clicking and the jokes will keep coming—and many of them are actually funny!

New voice-acting and refreshed, hand-drawn art are better than you might expect from a modest Kickstarter

The Bad

Puzzles hew far too closely to the original

Expect the usual point-and-click moments of unclear, confusing solutions with few hints, even for familiar puzzles

The Ugly

Don't kid yourself; the game's sense of inclusion didn't see any remastering

Verdict: Try it.