Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Dry Twice

The Good
You can't talk about a Leisure Suit Larry game without addressing the elephant in the room: How good is the humor and how sexist is it? The game takes the machine gun approach to humor: fire at least six gags per minute and hope that at least one of them hits. Although the constant sex puns get a bit tedious during the second half, I think it works quite well (at least if you are able to evoke your inner 13-year-old self). I don't want to get into the unavoidable sexism debate, but since Larry is presented as a loser from the 80's, his telephone AI usually has a humorous rebuttal ready and the game has lost the "you need to give presents to women and they reward you with sex" structure, I didn't see any glaring problems. However, there was one part involving a male member of a lesbian cannibal tribe which transported some unfortunate transphobic stereotypes and wasn't even funny or clever.

The game structure is obviously closely inspired by Monkey Island 2, one of my all-time favorites: the second and biggest part of the game, without counting the tutorial, gives you access to multiple islands and overall six goals which can be tackled almost independently. Coming directly from The Longest Journey, the puzzles were a delight. Most of them are very logical (at least when applying cartoon logic) and I usually had only myself to blame when I was stuck.

The Bad
While I enjoyed most of the puzzles, they also have the unfortunate tendency to annoy the player without need: forced backtracking, the need to repeat the same puzzle multiple times, no feedback for wrong (but valid) approaches and sometimes off-screen locations changes without a good reason. Oh, and the second-to-last chapter consists mostly of a disgusting labyrinth.

The game is also pretty buggy. I can live with some graphical glitches, but the dialogue is a mess: it is full of repeated lines, wrong lines, missing lines and spoken lines which are different than the subtitles. This is unacceptable for a point & click adventure game.

The Bottom Line
If you like the humor and Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don't Dry, you can't go wrong with this title. It is an above-average adventure game which has some annoyances, but it does everything well enough. However, I have to dock my rating because of the bugs.