Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Dry Twice (PC) Review

Here's the deal with Wet Dreams Dry Twice: if you have played the previous instalment, you've seen everything this has to offer. Sure, this takes place in a tropical island (amongst other places), whereas the original was basically a homage to the first Larry game, and thus had Larry run around a dirty metropolis… but as a whole, they are almost identical both in theme and gameplay. 'Almost' is the key word.

First, the good stuff. This uses the same, bright and vibrantly colourful palette, with each and every single scene being very good-looking and detailed… aaand that's about it. No, really. That's the only positive thing about this. Sadly, it doesn't fix one of the first one's main issues, which was how it artificially "stretched" gameplay time by adding lots of filler content, mostly in the way of puzzles.

Like before, this has the player picking up tons of garbage from the environment, in order to bypass all sorts of obstacles. The bread and butter of point-and-clicks, right? Sure, that's what must be done in most of them, but here this goes overboard with the items that can be picked up, mixed, and used, essentially dragging the experience down. There's absolutely no reason this should take eight hours to reach the end.

The best example of the way this handles the puzzle-solving, is probably the very second "level," where Larry, while stranded on a tropical island, searches for a girl from the previous title that he has fallen in love with. The simple act of learning where she might be needs one to two hours of running from NPC to NPC gathering info, and from area to area gathering items and mixing and matching them. In other words, the whole thing takes place in the same spot for too darn long.

Note that this isn't a bad game. Some of the puzzles are actually pretty fun to figure out, with the solution to most having the right amount of weirdness the genre needs - it's just that it has an awful pacing that ruins it all. Even worse than the gameplay, however, is how the naughty comedy aspect has been handled - also known as the one thing that always mattered the most in the series.

Forget silly-yet-fun innuendos and double entendres. The dirty one-liners in here are way too obvious, uninspired, and heavy-handed, and happen so often that it gets tiring. Remember the commentary on… well, pretty much everything by the narrator of Love for Sail? You can forget about him. This is all about filling each and every scene with yonic and phallic objects. Juvenile. Even for a Larry game.