Some of the images in this review are what some people like to call Not Safe For Work. Consider yourself warned.
2018 re-kindling of the Leisure Suit Larry series took me by surprise. The first surprise was, that someone was still willing to dip their hand in a series that is by some people seen as too sexist for modern time. The second was, that the new entry, Wet Dream Don't Dry, was actually a pretty solid game in its own right. After a couple of abysmal misfires that were the Larry Lovage games, Larry was finally bought, kicking and screaming, to the modern world, his 1980s personality still intact.
I wasn't really expecting a sequel despite Wet Dreams Don't Dry did end with a cliffhanger with Faith, Larry's dream girl, going missing. That's why I was kinda surprised when a sequel appeared in a speedy fashion. Unlike most of the games in the Larry series, Wet Dreams Dry Twice (a terrible name for a game) begins pretty soon after the events of the first game.
The lanky pervert is still stranded in Cancúm island, where he is living in the ruins of the mansion he accidentally destroyed. Pi, the artificial intelligence of his Prune Phone, has done her best in schooling Larry in the ways of the modern world, but with little success. When she finally manages to crack the file Faith sent to Larry at the end of the previous game, Larry decides to head out and search for his lady love as the file contains coordinates to where the file was sent.
Following the leads, Larry ends up on Kalau island. Little does he know, that at the same time the new North Korean owner of Prune has set his best agent, deadly Yanmei, to his heels in hopes of finding Faith and her secret AI algorithm he intends to use in Prune's new line of fembots.
The quest for Faith takes Larry through several islands of Kalau, where he meets some characters from the first game as well as new faces. Larry even manages to score a couple of times. After Larry finds Faith and restores her memory, Yanmei storms in and captures her. Luckily for Larry, there's an old KGB base hidden in the volcano at Kalau, from where he finds a helicopter he takes back to New Lost Wages.
At Prune, Larry hitches it up with an underground resistance. They aim to prevent Wang from unleashing his fembots upon the unsuspecting world. Larry has to find the stuff the resistance needs to complete their resistance things. After that's done, Larry ends up trapped in a low-resolution virtual world, where Pi is trying to create a continual perfect day for him. Luckily, he finds a way out and the rogue AI is deleted for good. And the best part? He gets the girl in the end.
Wet Dreams Dry Twice is not quite as strong of an entry to the franchise as the Wet Dreams Don't Dry was. This comes mostly down to the puzzle design, which feels this time around a bit lazier and less inspired. There are several trial and error puzzles and some of the puzzles manage to hit moon logic a bit too hard. There's also the lazies adventure puzzle at the end of the game, maze. And you even have to navigate it a couple of times in order to solve all the puzzles you need to solve. There is an attempt in turning the maze into a more genuine puzzle, but it all boils down to stitching the route together based on what you see and hear on any given screen. That, I found, was more annoying than fun.
There are two notable trial and error puzzles. The first is based on a sea chart used to navigate between the island. The second is really the whole last puzzle in the low-resolution virtual world. Both of these wear out their welcome as is the case with most things you have to repeat too many times.
Some puzzles require you to run back and are worth a bit too much. The worst of these is a puzzle where you have to open a caver door. To do this, you have to enter three symbols on disks at the front of the cavern there times. But in order to get the right sequence, you have to head back to another location, from where you get the right symbols based on the attributes the previous unlock provides. It wouldn't be a bad puzzle if it wouldn't have so much busy work accompanying it.
Perhaps the most interesting puzzle type this time around is the blueprint build system. Pi can scan in blueprints for several objects and Larry then has to find parts in order to make the device in question. Obviously, as this is Larry, he manages to build the things from either questionable fashion. There's some repetition here though, as you do have to build one item twice, but from different materials.
The style of humour shouldn't come as a surprise if you have played any of the previous games. Again, the game is filled with sex jokes, innuendo and phallic imagery (there are boobs and vaginas as well, so no need to be great about that). Larry interacts with the island and its inhabitants during his quest, at times managing to seduce a woman to do the vertical mambo. The jokes are fired in both verbal and visual form and this mostly works.
Some characters are perhaps a bit too chatty, some just don't work at all, but overall, there are more than a few laughs all around. Interestingly enough, Larry doesn't try to hit it on with every woman he sees this time around, but he does manage to get it on with some women more than once. The sex doesn't really leave Larry as the butt of the joke this time around unless you don't count the fact that he really isn't the lover he thinks he is. A couple of characters do stay more as side liners and you can ask a valid question of why they ever are in the game. Some of the lesser characters don't even work as a joke.
The voice acting is mostly pretty good. Rabson does, again, do a good job as Larry and Rawlins is a good foil to his overflowing sex jokes. The rest of the cast does an adequate job. I wouldn't call any roles as genuine standouts, but if the jokes they deliver are good, they usually manage to get over the goal line.
While Wet Dreams Dry Twice isn't quite as good as Wet Dreams Don't Dry, it still manages to be a solid entry to the Larry series. It concludes the story begun in the previous game and even does shed some insight, at least as far this new iteration of Larry goes, to what might have happened to him after the last Al Lowe game, Love for Sail.
If you were looking for a new Larry game after Wet Dreams Don't Dry, you could play worse than this new entry is.
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