Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Dry Twice review: Longer and harder

The humor is Leisure Suit Larry’s weakest point, but Wet Dreams Dry Twice is a gratifying adventure with great puzzles and a story that keeps your eyes on the prize.

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Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Dry Twice is a direct sequel to 2018’s Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry. As you’d expect, the two are similar in many ways: they share the same groan-worthy humor, colorful art style, and satisfying point-and-click puzzles.

In fact, the two games are so alike that they share most of their strengths and weaknesses, to the point where I can just copy whole sentences from my review of Wet Dreams Don’t Dry, and they’d still be accurate.

So instead, I’ll focus on how Wet Dreams Dry Twice does things better than its predecessor. Because when you get right down to it, Larry’s newest adventure is just that – better.

Sail For Love

Wet Dreams Dry Twice picks up where Wet Dreams Don’t Dry ended (some spoilers to the previous game ahead): Faith is lost at sea, presumed dead, and Larry is stuck on the island of Cancúm. But when he receives a message from Faith, he goes on an island-hopping journey to find her and profess his love.

Story-wise, you have to have played the previous game to understand what’s going on and why you should care. It also helps you appreciate how much tighter and focused the sequel is.

You’re touring around a tropical archipelago looking for pieces of an ancient artifact that will unlock some sort of mystery. It’s a page straight out of the Monkey Island series, which old-school adventure fans will agree is a fantastic source of inspiration. And just like the hunt for the map pieces in Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, you pursue a few different quests simultaneously while always working towards a clear goal.

It’s great that if you get stuck following one direction, you can flip through your “to-do list” and find a different puzzle to try and solve. Because once again, the puzzles are the best part of this Leisure Suit Larry game.

Bigger Than You’d Expect

The new Leisure Suit Larry games follow the same basic gameplay of the older ones, using simple point-and-click controls to explore the environment, pick up everything, and solve puzzles.

Just like the story, the puzzles in Wet Dream Dry Twice are excellently paced and slowly but surely ramp up the challenge as the game goes on. You’ll start by unlocking doors with keys but quickly find yourself building a sea-worthy raft out of junk you find lying around.

There’s a new crafting mechanic that has you cobbling together complex rigs using simple items. For example, when you build your raft, one of the parts you need is a sail. You don’t have a sail, but you have a pile of used underwear… and that dead narwhal’s tusk could be a perfect mast. The catch is you need to figure out which items to use for all parts of the contraption before you can craft it. Overall, this new system may not as deep or clever as in some survival games, but it offers a different, fun kind of challenge.

Wet Dream Dry Twice is, all-in-all, a more challenging game than 2018’s Larry title. The added difficulty is partly because the game takes a turn for the weird towards the end, with stupid minigames, mazes, and even a time loop. However, the challenge mostly comes from how vast the game is.

Environments are huge (for a point-and-click adventure game) with lots of people to talk to and things to keep track of and remember. Not to the point where you need to bust out the old pen and paper, but enough to keep things fresh and let you explore and discover new items or solutions.

Sexy, but Not “Haha” Funny

Leisure Suit Lary: Wet Dreams Dry Twice is more challenging than its predecessor and also more daring. In other words, it comes close to feeling like one of the Larry games I played growing up, for better or worse.

The jokes are dirtier, there are even more penis, boobs, and vagina-shaped objects on the screen and the cutscenes are a bit raunchier than before. But what can I say – it all just fits. It doesn’t feel vulgar, forced, or out of place – it feels like what you’d find in a Larry game.

Yeah, Larry’s particular brand of humor isn’t always the best fit for the 21st century, but the new games perform an admirable balancing act of keeping Larry’s… charm? intact while never crossing any lines.

That doesn’t mean the game is funny, though. There are funny moments, sure, and the overall atmosphere is lighthearted and inviting, but many of the references and jokes feel a little outdated. It could be because anything before 2020 (or last month) feels like it happened eons ago, but I kept finding myself saying, “Oh right, that was a thing,” whenever I spotted another reference.

Pick-up Artist

Leisure Suit Lary: Wet Dreams Dry Twice is a step in the right direction, and overall a very gratifying adventure game. The humor still feels outdated, and you might suffer from innuendo overdose by the end. But I enjoyed exploring the mysteries of the Kalaua’a archipelago and pointing and clicking like it’s 1996.

The voice acting and visuals are (once again) a treat, and So, if you’re looking for a good time, give Larry Laffer a call. You’ll have a blast, and you might even not regret it in the morning.

Our Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Dry Twice review copy was provided by the publisher.

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