REVIEW : Leisure Suit Larry – Wet Dreams Dry Twice (PC)
Adventures fans are a very strange group of gamers and I speak with knowledge of the facts: I’ve been one of them for years. Don’t get me wrong, I still love a fun point and click adventure, but I’ve now left behind that compelling need for products that recall my nostalgic memories of the 90s. Unfortunately, not all of the aforementioned fans of the genre come to share my approach, especially those who would like nothing more than the eternal revival of the classics Lucasarts and Sierra. So here we come to the new Wet Dreams Dry Twice.
Larry Laffer is the perfect definition of “classic adventure character”, on the other hand, the original Leisure Suit Larry in The Land of the Lounge Lizard dates back to 1987, several years before the birth of the much loved one – especially on Italian soil – Guybrush Threepwood. Five titles followed the original, developed by Al Lowe, a designer in love with double entenders, typically American cultural references and very bad jokes. The last title in the original series developed by Sierra Entertainment was Love for Sailof 1997, then the series – as well as Sierra – took a bad turn, turning into sad collections of minigames with Larry’s nephew. Several years after the death of that execrable experiment, and thanks to the direct interest of the German developer CrazyBunch, the good Laffer returns to the desperate search for busty women willing to interlock genitals by interference.
Larry Laffer in the land of the Teutonic developers
The first title of the new series, Wet Dreams Don’t Dry, was released in 2018, accompanied by a fair response from critics and audiences. Dry Twice is a sequel that doesn’t change anything in the design and gameplay; although it is not strictly necessary to have played the previous one to enjoy it, it certainly helps since the plot picks up where it left off. Larry finds himself stranded on a Mexican-themed island, forced to marry the daughter of the beefy local governor. Unfortunately, there is no marriage to do, because ours is still madly in love with Faith, her crush even in the previous game. Here begins the bizarre adventure of our balding hero in search of the missing lover, ending up in the usual absurd situations such as, among many others, being captured by cannibal lesbians. And no, no snu-snu death this time.
Since we are faced with a classic point-and-click, all the rules of the genre apply: we will be forced to collect all the objects we find, to use them more or less everywhere to solve the puzzles and to exhaust any possible conversation with others. characters.
Point and click, point and pray
The puzzles, for the most part, remain fairly accessible, although there are a couple of particularly illogical and delusional instances. Unfortunately, there is no real integrated clue system; it is possible to ask for some suggestions but, remaining these rather generic, it doesn’t seem that CrazyBunch has thought about accessibility for all players. In short, although fans of the genre are now accustomed to a certain non-terrestrial logic, I would have more appreciated an opening by Dry Twice as a product aimed at a general audience of gamers.
Unfortunately, Dry Twice’s design seems to use puzzles more as a way of artificially extending longevity without adding actual content, rather than as an element to enrich the gameplay. This becomes particularly evident as soon as Larry, escaped from his betrothed, arrives on the tropical island where most of the remaining hours of the game will take place. J
Small updates between friends
Attempts to rejuvenate the old man’s character are generally well thought out. For example, the game menu is designed as a sort of smartphone, the iPhone, where, among the various useless apps, and female AI is installed, which will not fail to fuck Larry if he makes some inappropriate reference to the current ones. politically correct times. Yes, the politically correct is present in the writing of Dry Twice, but since we are talking about Teutonic and non-American developers, ours is almost always left free to say and do what he wants, without too many limits.
Graphically, Wet Dreams Dry Twiceboasts an accurate 2D graphics, exactly like the previous one, with very pleasant and richly detailed coloured backgrounds, as well as more than discreet animations. It is also true that the low budget nature of the development ends up getting noticed, for example in the aforementioned Instacrap sequences, made with animated images at the best that seem to come out of the flash games of 2000. Larry, then, never directly interacts with the objects, but keeps them hidden in his jacket or behind his back: an evident sign of savings in the development of animations. The voice actors, on the other hand, do an excellent job with the material available, we will also find the inevitable nasal and plaintive accent of Laffer, now his fixed characteristic since 1997: surely the fans of the series will not be able to complain, from this point of view.
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