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The Leisure Suit Larry games are one of those things no one really admits to liking. There’s clearly an audience for them - you don’t release roughly 10 games over the last 30 years without gaining a decent following (yes, they’ve been around that long). However, the mixture of school playground humour and Carry On levels of sexual innuendo makes them a real oddity, especially in today’s increasingly sensitive, PC-minded culture. And the fact the series has produced some truly terrible titles over the years, crude jokes and all.

Thankfully, Leisure Suit Larry - Wet Dreams Don’t Dry isn’t a bad game. In fact, it’s a competent little point and click adventure that dials back into the conceit that made some of the earlier games so popular. That Larry Laffer - the greasy protagonist and self-confessed ‘ladies man’ who’s always looking for love - is consistently the butt of the joke, rather than the often cartoonish women he’s pursuing, helps water-down the often tasteless dialogue. That doesn’t mean new developer CrazyBunch is holding off on the smut, but it’s at least doing so with a sense of self-awareness.

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Wet Dreams Don't Dry does this by transporting Larry from the slapstick hedonism of the ’80s to the ‘woke’ era of today. With his flared white suit and greased back hair, Larry emerges from a dark basement to find himself in a city he barely recognises. So, naturally, the first thing he does is start looking for women. As a man-child out of time, Larry finds himself with social media obsessed people obsessed with platforms such as Instacrap, Farcebook and Timber. It’s a game that’s constantly lampooning itself and modern dating sensibilities, with its entire premise based around the quest to improve Larry’s Timber rating.

While most of the women Larry ends up taking out on a date are often a caricature of sorts - such as a social media-obsessed hipster you meet during the game’s opening hours - they’re not two-dimensional airheads solely defined by their sexual attraction. Which, we suppose, is progress for the series at least. Then again, you’ll be spending your time exploring New Lost Wages, a city with an alarmingly large number of phallic-shaped buildings. So maybe not.

As you might imagine, its humour is very spotty and while there’s plenty of self-reverential moments - with characters often pointing out specific tropes tied to the point-and-click genre itself - it’s still a game about a sleazeball trying to get his end away with a series of Timber dates. Puzzles are pretty standard fare, falling back on the tried and tested method of walking around a scene, interacting with characters and environmental elements. You’ll head into your inventory (accessed by pressing ‘+’) and combine items to solve puzzles, and glean clues from chatting to various NPCs along the way.

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While CrazyBunch has managed to produce a setting and story that at least pastiches its ridiculous central character as much as it shoots for dull sex jokes, the same can’t be said for its approach to puzzle design. This is a long way from the quality of Double Fine’s conundrums. The biggest issue is the sheer lack of logic that often goes into their structure - such as items that seemingly wouldn’t even need to be combined or hidden switches that couldn’t be any more concealed if they tried.

As a port, Wet Dreams Don't Dry is a more tactile experience thanks to the inclusion of both Joy-Con and touchscreen support. The ability to move Larry around with the left analog stick makes navigation much smoother, but the contextual nature of the face buttons never stops being awkward to control. We found mixing the analog stick with the touchscreen (for interacting with characters and using items in your inventory) an agreeable combo, although you’re never going to be as smooth as using a mouse. Utilising items in your inventory is a tad frustrating, especially in the first hour or so, as you can’t drag items to a location on-screen (you have to activate them then leave the inventory and use them where you need them). It’s clearly a design choice made with a lack of mouse in mind, but it never feels natural compared to other point-and-clickers on Switch.

Conclusion

While playing a Leisure Suit Larry game is the gaming equivalent of being seen reading a copy of the Daily Sport, this mostly unwanted revival of the series is actually far better than anyone was expecting. Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don't Dry's 2D art style has a ’90s comic book feel to it, while the simple point-and-click gameplay is a far better fit than the awful open-world approach the Larry Lovage games took in recent years. While some of the jokes do land, many don’t (even with its tongue impaled through its cheek), and with some often utterly obtuse puzzle designs you’re probably better off enjoying the superior offerings this genre has to offer on Switch.