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Suited and Rebooted, hide your daughters, Larry is back!

Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry is a modern reboot of the classic adventure game series that originally released in 1987. The originals were characterised by their lewd nature and raunchy story-lines, following Larry Laffer in his quest to sleep with as many beautiful women as possible. This new entry does not deviate from its predecessors, except Larry has jumped forward in time to 2018 and has to deal with a whole new dating culture. The feeling of the original games is not lost however; Larry was clueless then and he’s clueless now. Also there are spoof names for every mobile app.

Given the recent trend of games with a narrative focus across all aspects of the industry, from indie solo auteurs to AAA titles, perhaps Leisure Suit Larry can slide into the DMs of players’ hearts and satisfy the incessant nostalgia boner that leads to accident after accident. Here’s looking at you Mighty No 9. The question is, is the new entry to the series smoking hot, or best enjoyed with beer goggles?

Larry has been sent forward in time to the year 2018, for some reason. It was dark, he was drunk; the details are hazy. Instead of dwelling on the consequences of this, he falls for the executive assistant of Prune, a tech company named after a fruit (with a logo that looks like a vagina). He is then tasked with getting matches on dating app “Timber” in order to convince her that he is worth getting to know better. Previously, he understood the lay of the land, so to speak, but now Larry has to deal with modern nuisances including hipsters, influencers, mobile phones and inconsistent Wi-Fi.

Not only has the setting been modernised, the principal themes of the game are also incredibly contemporary. Jokes centre around the modern society’s over-reliance on technology and female empowerment and there is sincere LGBT representation. However, Leisure Suit Larry still takes monumental amounts of piss out of every aspect of our society through ridiculous puzzles and contrived situations. And also dick jokes. Lots of dick jokes.

Larry and the supporting cast of characters all meet through Timber and they are generally likeable and entertaining, if superficial. You are rarely given opportunities to learn more about characters; anything you know about them will be directly relevant to the story or in their Timber profile. The best secondary character is the AI that lives in your PiPhone, who sticks with you as the game progresses. She mainly functions as the player’s face-palm representative as she sighs after every single innuendo. Larry’s dialogue options are a shining light throughout the game. Every conversation devolves into some sort of misunderstanding or dirty joke. Every line he says sounds like someone’s creepy uncle flirting with an 18 year old, and it’s fantastic!

Point-and-click “gameplay”

Without giving away any solutions, the puzzles are a mix of classic tropes and out of the box ridiculousness. You will be using vegan liquorice, bra-removing telekinesis and old game cartridges to progress as well as the requisite variety of sex toys that are to be expected in a Leisure Suit Larry game. It is important to explore every environment carefully as some of the objects are hidden very well. This can cause some frustrating progress walls if you are not careful. Similarly to the dialogue options, the only items you can find are directly related to your progress with no red herrings to lead you astray.

The game was at its best during its extended skits. It is truly a funny game and it left me in tears of laughter on more than one occasion. The game is not afraid to break the 4th wall but does not do it so excessively that it ceases to remain effective as a joke. Your progress feels satisfying thanks to changing environments and your Timber score improving. The achievements are quite clever too, encouraging you to try out different combinations of items for a cheap joke. This would have been more effective if there was actually an in-game reaction to accompany them.

However, it did have its flaws. Some of the characters’ voice acting was hard to listen to, especially given how few lines some of them had. The animation was nothing special and details that you would come to expect, such as item interactions or lip-syncing, were not there. As mentioned previously, some of the items needed to progress were difficult to find, tucked away in the environment, which can lead to frustrating periods without progress. A minor complaint, there were some language errors that should have been caught by QA, some of which made it into the voiceover.

Smash or Pass?

To summarise, Leisure Suit Larry felt like a classic game with a fresh coat of paint and new terrible white suit. It is a welcome entry into the adventure game genre and should please long-standing point-and-click fans without alienating newcomers. It is not exactly going to change the face of gaming as we know it, however it does open the door for other adventure games to join the new era of narrative in video games. Putting it simply, Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry is here for a good time, not a long time.

Score: 7.9