I haven’t played a Leisure Suit Larry game since 1987 when I tricked my mom into buying Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards for me at age thirteen. Honestly, I’m not sure why I didn’t play any of the rest, but when Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry came across my desk I immediately jumped on it. Why this one? Mostly because it felt like a homage back to the very first Leisure Suit Larry game, and I was in the mood for a slower paced adventure game. Developer CrazyBunch is behind this new version of Leisure Suit Larry, our first new game in over 5 years for the franchise. So, does Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry get lucky or does it go home alone and depressed? Find out with our full review!
Story
The story for Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry begins with Larry Laffer waking up in a dark hole. You don’t remember much about the night before or where you are currently at. Larry struggles to find a way out, and finds himself in front of Lefty’s Bar in the city of Lost Wages. When Larry heads into the bar, he discovers that he has been gone for over 30 years and is now in the 21st century. Larry is taken aback slightly by this news, but then sets out to chase as many women as he can in this new age.
The actual story takes off once Larry finds a PiPhone in Lefty’s bathroom. The PiPhone is a prototype with a new artificial intelligence, and it needs to be taken back to Prune headquarters right away. At Prune headquarters, Larry meets Prune CEO Bill Jobs and his assistant Faith. Larry attempts to hit on Faith, but she tells Larry that she will only date someone who has a Timber score of 90. Larry, now outfitted with a new PiPhone that he was given for turning in the prototype, sets out into Lost Wages to meet and date as many people as he can to get a Timber score of 90. His ultimate goal: a date with Faith!
From the start, just by reading the previous paragraph, you can tell which direction CrazyBunch went with their story for Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry. This game really pokes fun at both Microsoft and Apple, but mostly Apple, and the pervasive nature of technology in today’s culture. Most of the humor that CrazyBunch went with is seeing an out-of-time person like Larry Laffer dealing with today’s culture. The very first girl Larry meets is a woman obsessed with her Instacrap account and gaining as many followers as possible. He also meets a woman who is a camgirl on the internet, who is trying to make it big as a stripper.
There is a lot of positives and negatives here when it comes to Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry’s story line. I did like how the story pretends that none of the other games for the last thirty years in the Leisure Suit Larry franchise exists and that this game is a direct sequel to Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. However, while some of the jokes about today’s culture and society were funny, most of it felt forced or stereotypical. The story is very cynical when it comes to the current status of Tinder dating, the people you met in the dating scene, and Apple products and business practices. I also felt that the story ended fairly abruptly and without closure. I know this sounds mostly negative, but the storyline falls somewhere between mediocre and decent for me.
Game Play
Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry plays like a modern day point and click adventure game, very similar to the original game back in 1987. You use your cursor to look at and interact with the world around you. By left clicking on an item or person, you look at that item or person. By right clicking on the same item or person, you will then interact with them, based on what the person or item is. In some cases, this could lead to death. Death in Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry isn’t horrible, you get a cut scene explaining why you screwed up and then just get sent back to the moment when you entered an area.
Items you pick up will show up in your inventory screen. At first, this is represented by a notepad in the bottom right corner of your screen, but gets moved to an app on your PiPhone once you unlock that. Items can be examined in your inventory, and combined to create other items to solve puzzles. The puzzles in the game come in a variety of difficulty, but can all be solved with some thought and trial and error. Many puzzles have you traveling from location to location in order to complete tasks or pick up needed items to complete a quest. There is no quest tracker, so you will need to remember what everyone needs at any given time.
Your PiPhone becomes your means of interaction with most of the world in Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry. You can travel via the map and the Unter app, this replaces the taxi system in the first game, and will be able to check on your Timber score and other matches through that app. Not all of your Timber matches can be interacted with, only the ones you can interact with will appear on your map. The others just becomes a series of Tinder jokes.
Overall, the game play is exactly what I would expect from an adventure game. If you are a fan of point and click adventure games, then Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry hits all the right marks. Nothing new or innovative here, but it all works solidly for what it needs to do.
Aesthetics
Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry won’t win any awards for graphics, but it isn’t hideous either. The visuals are all done in a very cartoon-like style, reminiscent of other point and click adventure games on the market today. The areas that Larry can head to are all pretty 2 dimensional and limit where Larry can go. The design of the locations are all stylized and over the top. Prune’s store looks like a parody of an Apple store. Even Prune’s logo looks like a stylized vagina that could pass as an apple, which leads to a funny solution to a puzzle later in the game. There is a sex shop, a gym, a hipster bar, a pier and even a version of Cancun, Mexico.
What works better than the visuals is the voice acting. Larry sounds exactly as I would imagine him to sound, and this carries over to everyone you meet. The voice actors did a hell of a job making each character come alive. Yes, some of this includes acting out the stereotypes that the character represents, but the voice actor nails the tone of each character. The music is absolutely forgettable. I actually had to force myself to listen to it for this review, and it is just very generic background music to cover over the silence between character dialogue. In other words, it works for its purpose but you won’t remember any of it.
Final Thoughts
Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry is a good game. It is a very solid point and click adventure game and is also a very solid entry into the Leisure Suit Larry franchise. Taking the nostalgia factor out for a second, Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry ticks off all the right boxes to be a successful point and click game: the humor is decent, the game play is solid, the story line is mediocre to decent, and the graphics and voice acting to a good job in bringing the world to life. If you only have ever played the first Leisure Suit Larry game, then this game is perfect for you, since it forgets the other 8 games that are out on the market. If you are a fan of the series, then this game is already on your Steam library. Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry is available now via Steam for $29.99.
