Summary
Requiem aeternam
The Good
"Larry 7" continues the trend started already in the fifth game (and developed to the extent in the sixth): it is based more on free exploration than on trial-and-error. Since you can't die in this game, you feel free to try all kind of funny combinations (to hear funny comments from the narrator), talk to everyone about everything, experiment with items and dialogue possibilities, and so on. The result is: this game is pure fun to play. Gone is the frustration from earlier Larry games, where you could find yourself somewhere deep in the game, only to discover you forgot to pick up a key object in the beginning, and had to restore an early save or even to restart the whole thing again. Gone are tricky action sequences where timing was essential and where death awaited you around each corner. Now you can explore the ship at your pleasure, and enjoy the cartoony eye-candy as long as you like.
Already the fifth Larry shocked many true Larry fans (such as myself), by introducing an old, bald cartoony geezer, instead of the handsome pixelated gentleman we got used to playing the first three games of the series. The seventh game makes a full usage of the latest cartoon technology (just like Lucas Arts did it at the same time), and presents a completely disproportioned Larry raving in SVGA environments and sexy babes with .BMP extensions to decorate your desktop. Now the characters don't just talk funny: they look funny, too. The characters are large and expressive, the backgrounds lovely, and the music, thanks to the possibilities of the CD ROM, reaches perhaps its most glorious moment in the history of Leisure Suit Larry. Already the early MIDI music of Larry games was great, but not it is all nicely packed in beautifully orchestrated audio tracks... how about that?
"Larry 7" comes with lots of extra-stuff, starting with mini-games such as "find a dildo", and ending with a piece of paper that you could scratch in order to experience the authentic smell of a given moment in the game. Virtual environment, huh? Besids, you could record your own voice to replace some of the dialogue lines. The game itself was also full of such cool stuff. You could play dice, cook stuff in a pot, or discover various eastern eggs to see all the girls in their natural versions.
What really saves "Larry 7", a game with only one location, and almost completely devoid of story, from being boring and repetitious, is the interaction. The mid-nineties was a dangerous time for the adventure genre, the interface became more and more simple, and the puzzles more and more mindbreaking. Instead of letting the player interact with objects in various ways, many adventure games preferred leading him by the nose, allowing him only to click on the screenm, just to throw him into some unsolvable puzzle, that would take hours and days of his life, that could have been spent on actively playing the game. Luckily, "Larry 7" escapes this temptation. The interface of "Larry 7" is, simply said, the best ever conceived for an adventure game, it combines the relative simplicity of contemporary style with the good old early text typing! If you still don't understand how cool that is, go and play this game. Every object gives you a standard choice of interaction posibilities, plus the ability to type any verb you like and to see what will happen. Every dialogue you participate in allows you to choose freely any subject at your pleasure, beside other available options. Of course, most of the objects won't interact but the way they were intended to in order to proceed in the game, and most of dialogue choices won't lead anywhere, but what matters here is the trying aspect, not the results themselves. The game encourages experimenting and demands creativity - that's the right ingredient for a great adventure. Not to mention that some puzzles REQUIRE you typing in a verb or a topic that is not offered by the game. The puzzles are also excellent, most of them being quite tricky. They fit nicely into the game's design and overall atmosphere.
Lastly, the game still manages to be funny, even though you wouldn't expect it after so many Larry games released before it. The girls' names are simply hilarious (names of famous American actresses and singers, slightly changed to create a humorous effect), some parts of the story will definitely make you laugh (such as most of the "final confrontations" with the girls), the dialogue is funny, accompanied by good voice-overs, and the narrator provides a solid entertainment throughout the whole game.
The Bad
Yet it is clear and doesn't require any explanation, that the wonderful series has reached its end with this game. One more Larry would have probably been a crime and a disgrace to the series. Seeing what happened to Indiana Jones or even Ultima, we could have expected something like a first-person shooter entitled "Leisure Gun Larry Nukem: Lie Or Die", if they had decided to continue the series. Indeed, everything has been already said, and in fact, everything has been already said before "Larry 7". The story of this game is almost painfully unoriginal, the many amusing encounters with the opposite sex members don't quite make up for the absence of suspense and general sense of the plot. After the cool
second game, the story of this one seems almost pathetic. They also weren't very generous with locations. Just like "Larry 6", everything happens in a sole place her, and that doesn't change during the entire game. Of course, you explore and gain access to more and more rooms playing the game, but you can't leave the ship itself, and the overall feeling is that of monotony.
Except the story, Larry himself is the one who suffered the most in this game. Gone is the pure Larry from the first game (who wasn't satisfied just by having sex, who needed to please his other organs as well, if you recall!), the brave Larry from the second (who didn't care that much for women, since there was more important stuff to do!), and the passionate Larry from the third one (where is my only love, Patty? What did you do to her?!). Instead, what we got here is some kind of a cheap seducer, perhaps still unattractive to women, but not because he is so out of fashion, but because he is simply unpleasant. Larry's mind is preoccupied only with women in this game, much like in "Larry 6", that's why those two games are in my eyes the beginning of an end, and bear definite symptoms of degradation. And don't tell me Larry was always like this. It's enough to play any other early Larry game to see he had much more personality than this jerk they are trying to sell us as the true Larry here.
The Bottom Line
It's been fun playing you, Leisure Suit Larry. We had many great moments with you. But as Buddha Shakyamuni says, anything that once had a beginning is bound to come to an end. "It is time to be born, and it is time to die" (Eccl., III, 2). Now rest in peace, Leisure Suit Larry. We won't forget you.
