Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don't Dry

Despite being a big fan of point and click adventure games as a kid, I have to confess that I was never that into Leisure Suit Larry. I liked his outdated fashion and crass sense of humor, but the games always felt one-note and couldn't hold my attention. I went into his newest adventure, Wet Dreams Don't Dry, worried that it was just going to be a celebration of everything I didn't like about those old games. But I was wrong. Despite the dumb subtitle, this is a smart and often clever point and clicker that perfectly justifies its existence by turning Larry into a fish-out-of-water character who is endlessly confused by the 21st century. For as much as this game is about trying to hook up, it also underlines just how much the dating scene has changed in the last thirty years.

At this point, Larry Laffer is basically Austin Powers. He literally stumbled out of the year 1987 at the beginning of the game, completely oblivious to the fact that it's now 2018. He's still the 40 year old loser we loved back in the day, only now he's a little taller and drawn in HD. Unfortunately, the rest of the world has moved on without him and doesn't seem particularly interested in waiting for the hopeless bachelor to catch up. He's never heard of the internet, is completely confused by smart phones and is still trying to figure out where all the taxis have gone. This is not the world Larry remembers.

As luck would have it, our bewildered hero stumbles across a discarded smartphone in Lefty's bathroom. But it's not just any old smartphone, because this is a super-secret prototype device created by Bill Jobs at the nearby Prune facility. Bill wants the phone back, but Larry wants to get a date with the sexy woman that works at Prune. This inspires our horny hero to get back in the game and improve his online dating score, all in hopes of winning over a woman who is way outside of his league.

This sets up a fun little adventure where Larry tries to hook up with all kinds of women (and men) on a Tinder-like app. At its best, this allows our monumentally clueless hero to explore the differences between 1987 and today. And it goes far beyond simply learning to swipe left and right, because Larry has entered a more open and social society that frowns on a lot of the chauvinistic antics that were considered acceptable thirty years ago. Larry has always been out of step with the world around him, but here he's a walking, talking reminder of how much the world has changed in just a few decades.

In some ways, this juxtaposition makes Larry a more compelling character. It helps that, despite coming across as incredibly creepy most of the time, Mr. Laffer is always good-natured. He's often confused and usually says the wrong thing at the worst possible time, but he's not mean or judgmental. Even when he's clearly thrust into uncomfortable situations, he ends up being an understanding guy who is willing to do whatever it takes. It would have been so easy to turn Larry into the butt of every joke, but he's floating through a city filled with characters who are somehow even more over-the-top than the guy wearing a white leisure suit.

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As a point and click adventure game, you've seen a lot of this before. This is the kind of game that loads you up with more items than you know what to do with. In fact, there's so much to pick up and interact with that there will be times where you'll hit a wall and just have to try item combinations until you figure it out. In that sense, this is very much an old school graphic adventure game. Not every puzzle has a logical solution, and sometimes it feels like the game errs more on the side of luck and persistence than well-reasoned solutions. There were more than a few times where I just shook my head in disbelief after stumbling into what the developers wanted me to do.

I think part of the problem is that the game throws too many items at you at once. It's often overwhelming, even as somebody who has spent a lot of time playing this style of point and click adventure game. There are times when you'll have more than two dozen items to content with, which is a lot to juggle, especially when it's not always clear what you're supposed to do with any of those objects. And it's not that other modern games in the genre don't have items to pick up, but they rarely have you keeping track of this much at one time. It's the kind of overkill that will complicate an already convoluted story.

On the other hand, once you break through that wall and figure out what you're supposed to do next, it usually clears a fairly obvious path where you're completing a bunch of puzzles one after another. I don't want to oversell how frustrating the game can be, because your goals are generally pretty straight-forward. A cam girl won't move out of the apartment Larry wants until she gets a better job, a rocker won't date our hero until his finds her stolen guitar, a fitness instructor refuses to be impressed until we prove our physical strength. Everybody has something they want from Larry, which has us Ubering all over town all in the hopes of getting a happy ending.

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A lot of the charm comes from the voice acting and colorful cast of characters. From self-obsessed millennials to conspiracy theorists to Apple Store employees, everybody knows exactly who they are mocking so there's almost no subtlety here. There are a lot of obvious jokes and observations here, to the point where it sometimes feels like they're going after low-hanging fruit. I like the characters and the voice cast that brought them to life, but I wish the game would have found more ways to subvert expectations.

And that's a criticism that rings true across the board. There are a lot of absurdly predictable and obvious plot points that keep us from the more interesting elements. I loved seeing the difference between generations through Larry's eyes, but they don't go far enough with it. There's a really interesting game to be made about how a guy from the 1980s would deal with the #MeToo generation, but Leisure Suit Larry mostly opts for cheap shots at millennials. While I still enjoyed the adventure Larry goes on, I could never shake the feeling that there's a much more biting commentary waiting to break free from this fairly routine point and click game.