Leisure Suit Larry - Wet Dreams Dry Twice Review

Being a huge fan of classic point-and-click DOS games from Sierra’s heyday, I knew I’d jump at the chance to get my hands on the latest Larry Laffer game. The Leisure Suit Larry franchise has had many incarnations over the years, but the only one I ever really played (and enjoyed) was the first one—rather, the remake of the first one, which was In the Land of the Lounge Lizards in 1991. Sure, it was cheesy, sleazy, and stereotypically not for women, but I still had a blast with it, because why the heck not? Larry Laffer may be a pervert, but you kind of want to root for him for some reason, and I was relieved to find out that the same is still true with Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Dry Twice.

Since this is a direct sequel of Wet Dreams Don’t Dry, the game starts with a recap of the events that transpired there. Larry apparently fell through from the ‘80s and had a bunch of misadventures with this girl named Faith, but since I had no idea what the Wet Dreams Dry Twice’s predecessor was all about, I didn’t really care for all that backstory. You kind of stumble through but eventually get the hang of the story—thankfully, the game has enough going for it on its own so you’re not compelled to play the first one. 

Throughout the game, Pi—the A.I. installed in your PiPhone—calls you out on your inappropriate behavior, which is probably just there to make sure nobody gets offended with Larry’s not-so-sensitive outlook in life. He apparently even has this sensitivity class that helps him navigate through the tricky waters of political correctness in the 21st century—of course, no amount of sensitivity training can really water down all the sex jokes and innuendos in every scene. I mean, there’s a phallic symbol in every single backdrop, and while it’s fun for a minute or two, it eventually gets kinda old, really. But thanks to the vibrant graphics and the campy, cartoony art, it’s still a fun experience to explore every new scene despite all the phalluses in the background.

Particularly, hitting the spacebar or the middle button on the mouse shows you all of the prompts on the screen that you can interact with, but typical of point-and-click games, you really have to do a whole bunch of trial-and-error to get to where you want to go. It doesn’t help that Larry’s nasally voice comments throughout the whole thing—you can imagine how annoying it gets whenever Larry comments that you’d “better not” or that “those two things won’t work together” each time you try something new.

To help speed things up, there’s this new blueprint app on Larry’s phone that acts as a guide whenever you need to combine things, which can range from logical, easy-to-figure-out instructions to those that are just downright ridiculous. I mean, at one point, you have to combine a ground-up snake with your own urine to mix a cocktail and serve it to a travel blogger (don’t ask). Things like that can be really frustrating—you can get stuck on a particular part for hours on end— because there’s just no possible way you’ll think of that logically. There are plenty of ideas that you basically figure out through trial-and-error, which, admittedly, was exactly what those old DOS games were all about.

I also didn’t like how you had to talk to every single person and go through every single dialogue to make sure you get all the information you need. Miss a conversation and you might miss out on a whole thing altogether, preventing you from progressing further into the game. For example, I had to talk to this NPC a bunch of times to make sure I unlock a certain line of dialogue that will make him give me a blueprint I needed—I found it incredibly tedious to keep going back to these people just to see if any new line of dialogue has opened up. It’s also very possible for you to get stuck just because you didn’t talk to certain people in a particular order.

While the game does a good job of updating the gameplay to the modern era (there were also plenty of Easter eggs for fans of Star Wars and Monkey Island), some of those updates didn’t quite hit the mark. For instance, toward the end of the game, you’ll need to go through a certain challenge that plays very much like Flappy Bird (I had to fail the challenge before I found out I could actually skip it). Puzzles are really more about finding the right object and paying close attention to hints that NPCs drop every now and then. There was this repetitive labyrinth you had to go through in the latter part of the game that might make you ragequit altogether, because if you don’t pay attention to the directions from the NPC, you’re screwed.

As for the NSFW aspect of the game, the sooner you accept its lewdness, the better off you’ll be. Going into this, I already had a pretty clear picture of how my experience would go—the sex-overload of this supposedly humorous game is one of the reasons I wanted to play it in the first place. In that respect, I found that the R-rated elements here are actually pretty toned-down compared to the previous Larry game I played. Women are opinionated, but they’re mostly there as sex symbols—however, there wasn’t as much sex and nudity as the older game had. I actually really appreciated the story, but it just didn’t feel as much like a full-fledged Larry game as I thought it would be.

Thanks to the vibrant graphics and the campy, cartoony art, it’s still a fun experience to explore every new scene despite all the phalluses in the background.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the game. The voice acting is top-notch, and the humor is what you’d expect from a game with this kind of subject matter. It’s pretty self-aware. There was even this instance where you needed to dive down underwater, but instead of throwing together something as ridiculous as a fishbowl reinforced with tape and a fire extinguisher, you just hold your breath instead, because “assets cost money”. Larry also constantly breaks the 4th wall, and it’s those moments that really got a chuckle or two out of me. 

Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Dry Twice Review | Final Thoughts

Overall, Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Dry Twice pokes fun at society and drops pop culture references to really make for an entertaining experience. You can die a lot if you’re not careful, albeit in ridiculous and hilarious ways (e.g. death by thigh-crush), and when you do, you get revived in an 8-bit assembly line that pays homage to DOS games of old. Still, if you’re looking to immerse yourself in the whole Larry Laffer experience, it’s not going to be as wild as you might think. But if you’re just here to play a colorful point-and-click game that doesn’t take itself too seriously, then it’s a great way to pass the time when you want to take a quick break from the other games in your to-be-played pile.

TechRaptor reviewed Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Dry Twice on PC with a copy provided by the publisher.