Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry Review

When Leisure Suit Larry first hit the gaming scene it had an almost mythical quality to it as, believe it or not, I was still a kid and a game featuring saucy sex shenanigans was the holy grail for young men. When I eventually got to play it a few years later I was thoroughly disappointed; all those rumours about hot sexy babes and graphic jiggling turned out to be false. Instead I got a point and click adventure packed full of innuendo but very little sex.

Thirty-two years later and Larry has arrived on PlayStation 4. So much has changed in that time, and yet it’s the same as ever. Wet Dreams Don’t Dry is still an old fashioned point and click adventure packed full of smut, thrust into the modern day world. Emerging from what seems to have been cryogenic stasis, Larry has no experience of the modern world, so things like Uber taxis and iPhones confuse the hell out of him. Larry’s trademark sexism has no place in the present day, but instead of trying to reimagine the character as a modern man, Larry still makes crude and sexist remarks, but is now met with disdain or disbelief.

Surprisingly, the game has a very modern attitude to sex as Larry can match with both men and women on Timber, the in-game version of Tinder. The Lothario arranges date with another man called Dick in a darkroom with eye-opening consequences, befriends a dominatrix, and there’s also threesomes, lesbians, roleplay, and all sorts of kinky stuff, including a dildo on the end of a jackhammer.

There is still an awful lot of innuendo in the game, but it’s actually quite tame, like a saucy postcard found at the British seaside in the 1980’s. The headquarters of Prune, the game’s version of Apple, has a HQ shaped like a large cock and a balls, complete with a spurting fountain on the top, the Prune logo then looks like a vagina, and the company is run by a man called BJ. If you’re a fan of phallic objects then this is the game for you; almost every scene has something shaped like a cock and balls in the background. There’s a knowing sense of humour aimed at gamers as, after wrapping a phone in an indestructible bra, Larry quips “Now let’s see people say that sexy armour doesn’t provide any protection!”

The puerile humour raises a giggle now and then, but quite a few of jokes miss the mark. There is actual toilet humour involving an ‘Instacrap’ star having, well, an explosive crap, and when one of the Prune store employees asks you to get used panties for him to sniff, it’s on the wrong side of gross. Many of the characters are simple stereotypes, such as the hipsters who hang around in a bar and only drink vegan beer, but a few are fleshed out including the cam-girl who is going online to self fund her college education so she can read classical literature.

Playing on console, you can move the sex-starved anti-hero around each scene with one stick, but you cannot interact with anything unless you use the right stick to move a cursor. This is joined by a menu system that’s a poorly explained pain in the neck. The game doesn’t tell you how to combine items, let alone Timber, so I spent a lot of time randomly pressing buttons and getting very annoyed.

Equally frustrating are the solutions to some of the problems. Need to retrieve a phone from a literal pile of crap with a stick and loo roll in your inventory? You would expect you could poke the phone out of the crap and wipe it down with the tissue, right? No. You have to combine the toilet roll with the stick so it is stuck on the end, then use that to extract the phone. That makes no sense! The phone is still covered in crap and Larry has previously refused to go anywhere near the pile of gunk for fear of getting it on his hands. There is no hint system either, so the only way to work out what to do if you get stuck is to head to YouTube.

Wet Dreams is resolutely old school right down to not having an auto-save. You have to save it manually and again, that’s not explained, so when the game crashed after two hours play I lost two hours of my life. That’s a pain because it gets its knickers in a twist if you try and skip through dialogue. Characters talk over each other and if you go too fast it jams up and crashes. It’s a shame that the controls and illogical puzzles let the game down when there’s so many point and click adventures like Telltale’s adventures to copy.

The weird thing is, despite the giant cock and balls, bdsm dungeons, doors shaped like vaginas, occasional boobs, and cam girls, the story is surprisingly sweet. Larry helps out the characters, admittedly most of the time just so he can try and have sex with them, but he usually improves their lives and solves their problems. The game is still packed terrible knob gags and lady parts, but it is rather charming, even if you if you do have to craft a unicorn butt plug now and then.