I've seen Les Manley: In the Search of the King described as a Leisure Suit Larry clone. That is a false statement. While Les Manly has a couple of scenes with scantly clad ladies in it, it's not a sex romp like the Larry games are, where the main goals are about getting the girls. Les is a kind of a dweeb like Larry but with a lesser sex drive.
In the beginning, Les begins his work day realising he has worked for the TV company for two years. As it happens, the company has just announced the Search for the King, a competition to find the new Elvis. The price is one million dollars, so obviously Les thinks to make good use of his lunch break and find him. And that's really it. None of the puzzles you encounter during the game really matter one iota story-wise, it's all just a setup for comedy, which in my case falls flat.
In the end, Les arrives at Graceland, where he dresses up as the King, enters an impersonator contest, and having just eaten a hefty peanut butter and banana sandwich, he ends up winning it, thus becoming the new King. The studio doesn't have one million at hand, so Les becomes the new CEO. Que for a promise of a sequel, which was actually made a couple of years later. I guess the game sold well enough or someone at Accolade liked it more than I did.
Les Manley is a terrible, terrible game in every way you can imagine. Not only do most of the puzzles make no sense whatsoever, but the game keeps constantly cramping you with its terrible parser system. The parser requires exact phrases and words to get anything done. It's the epitome of bad parser design left over from the 1980s. None of the puzzles you encounter are really telegraphed at all to you, so you can't even trial and error it. You just need to know the stuff before you can even know them.
For example, here's a puzzle. You need Helmut, the smallest man in the world to join you. To do that, you must give him a dream. In the lobby of your TV station is a sleeping guard. Rather illogically, you can use the prompt to look at the dream, you can then pick up the dream and just give that dream to Helmut. None of this is really hinted to you at all, you are just expected to come to this string of conclusions naturally. This game really does defy even the worst of what Sierra had to offer, including that infamous Rumplestiltskin puzzle from King's Quest 1, where the only clue, found from an unrelated location, was to think backwards. But that is, at least a hint.
And there you go. That's really all there is to say about Les Manley. It's a terrible game. The only positive thing I have is, that some of the graphics look decent, but even they are inconsistent. If you really want to, you can get both Les Manley games from GOG GOG and Steam, but it really beats the hell out of me why you'd want to. With the price of these games, you can get something more enjoyable.
Comments
Post a Comment