What Is Leisure Suit Larry?
Leisure Suit Larry is a series of adult-themed games that were most popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s but somehow managed to shamble on until 2013. Like the name suggests, the series is focused on a middle-aged man named Larry Laffer, who seeks to seduce attractive women while wearing a leisure suit that he bought under the belief that the styles of the 1970s was still in fashion. The series creator Al Lowe has stated that Larry is supposed to be a parody of male chauvinism, but in practice, well, suffice to say that the execution of the series has not always been the best, which is a serious problem because of the ease with which parodies can cross the line.
What Is Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry?
Curiously, it seems that a German studio called CrazyBunch is planning to make a new Leisure Suit Larry game, which will be called Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry. This time, the game will be focused on Larry’s attempt to navigate the 21st century in spite of his 1980s attitudes about women as well as the rest of the world, which would explain why the marketing blurb seems to indicate that a substantial portion of the game will be focused on building up points for his profile on a Tinder equivalent called Timber.
Otherwise, the new Leisure Suit Larry game seems like it is going to be much the same as its predecessors. For example, it is still going to be a point and click game, which is a genre that doesn’t see a lot of titles in the present day. Likewise, it seems to have retained the series’s particular sense of humor, as shown by “gems” such as using “Instacrap” as the name of its in-setting Instagram equivalent. In other words, Leisure Suit Larry looks like it has remained Leisure Suit Larry, which is not necessarily a good thing considering how much the video game market has changed since the late 1980s and early 1990s. Never mind how the last Leisure Suit Larry game had numerous faults on top of this particular problem.
Further Considerations
Summed up, the Leisure Suit Larry series looks like it will be receiving a revival. Presumably, the people behind it believe that they can capitalize on consumer nostalgia, seeing as how Larry was one of the more recognizable PC gaming characters from his time. However, while the content of the Internet suggests that there is consumer interest in adult-themed games, there is no reason to believe that said interest extends to Leisure Suit Larry, which is closing in on being two decades out of date. As a result, one can’t help but suspect that this new game is going to meet the same fate as its predecessor, which is to say, both unloved and unheralded.
With that said, one can’t help but suspect that the new Leisure Suit Larry game could end up becoming a flash-point in the culture wars that are being waged in not just the video game market but also other entertainment markets such as comics and movies. After all, the marketing blurb suggests that the game is aware of sensitive topics such as #metoo, which raises the vaguely terrifying prospect that it is going to address them with all of the grace that one would expect from its bumbling protagonist. However, if we are lucky, Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams will be so underwhelming that it will come and go with nary a mention.
