Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded

The Good
Leisure Suit Larry was actually one of the first games I played, and certain the first adventure game and Sierra game I ever played. It was 1990, and I wasn't even 10 years old yet, and of all the Sierra games that I could have played first, the single least appropriate one had to be it! Granted we only got to play it for a precious few minutes before I had to quit, and my brother removed it for reasons that I didn't (then) understand, it stayed in my mind for years. We ended up playing other LSL games much later, but I never got the original until around 2000 to fully experience it in all its glory!

With the obligatory nostalgic rambling aside, how does this game compare to the original and the (first) remake? The game itself has very similar puzzles, but there's enough addition to it so that even old time fans will find it a challenge. But the puzzles aside, the game is hilarious on a scale that even the first incarnations couldn't even touch. The City of Lost Wages, while still consisting of the same locations, is far more hilarious and in tune with the humor that was developing during the early days of LSL.

The original game was extremely raunchy for the time. In 1987, there was simply nothing else like it. A nude painting in a bar? A flasher outside a cheap wedding chapel? And a game that kills you if you flush the toilet (which you can actually use for its purpose... on screen!), and most shockingly of all, allowing you have sex with a prostitute. Although it is extremely tame by today's standards, it was a shocker. The look and feel of Lost Wages was sleazy, but it could be sleazier. The 1991 kept most of the original dialogue with few additions, but it demolished just about all the sleaziness of Lost Wages. They turned the city into a pastiche of late 80s aesthetics and early 90s cartoon style characters. They had some additional options, including the sniff/taste and zipper, which did nothing for the vast majority of all objects in the game.

To say that LSL reloaded fixed this is an understatement. Gone is the flashiness of Lost Wages of the 1991 remake, and the sleaze of the original is back with a vengeance. Every single aspect of Lost Wages and its people just reeks of depravity and boy is it glorious. The prostitute in the original game was said to be not attractive, but it didn’t seem like that all, the 1991 remake made her only slightly scruffy, but otherwise OK. It was LSL Reloaded that finally got it right, the hooker there is so legitimately terrifying that it really does feel like you’re committing a sin by interacting with her. The interaction between Fawn and Larry makes him look even more naïve than he was in the first two remakes (seriously, marrying a woman you just met? How desperate do you have to be for that to happen?) since it not only pokes fun at the entire sham of a ceremony, but it transforms them, perhaps sounding even more like a broken record, into the biggest pairs of hilarious lowlifes that you wouldn’t approach even in a hazmat suit.

The humor of LSL has always been about social satire and sexual innuendo. The social satire is somewhat lacking in this game, due to it actually being based in 1987 and not 2013 (and thus most of the jokes would fly over most peoples’ heads). But whatever it lacks in social satire, it makes up for it in sex jokes. Almost everything has some hidden joke in it, and using the whole bodily function/sniff icon will give you a unique answer to just about everything, something that the 1991 remake could have done, but didn’t.

In short, it’s a spectacular example of what would happen if you let a dirty old man rewrite something he originally did decades prior with a mind full of stuff he had wished he did originally!

The Bad
Maybe I’m just a nostalgia laden guy and can’t really rip on the game, especially since it succeeded in making me laugh so hard, and reinvigorated my interest in adventure games, but there is one minor issue I wish they could have addressed. In the gambling mini-games located throughout Lost Wages, if you play them and lose, then restore your game, your bet resets to the lowest amount. Given how long it takes to get the bet back up to maximum, it’s extremely annoying and frustrating when you have to play and you want to max out your winnings (the game allows you go actually get more than 10K, but you’ll never need anywhere near that kind of money in the game). That’s basically the only thing that really irked me about the whole thing.

The Bottom Line
The game runs on nostalgia first, but it still holds quite well as an adventure game, and I would recommend it for newbies and veterans alike.

The Good
I am a big Leisure Suit Larry fan. The original version was my first adventure game. In introduced me to a magical genre that occupied my entire gaming interests at the dawn of my hobby. I solved it without any outside help. I was thrilled every time I found the right solution to a puzzle. I learned many English words playing that game. And much later, having discovered all its sequels, I enjoyed them as well and was always thankful to Al Lowe for creating all these gems that constituted an important bloc of classic adventuring.

Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded is not a remake of that game - it is a remake of its remake. First things first - I'm glad they decided to make it, and that despite the fact I think there was no need to make it. Allow me to explain: I'm glad somebody out there tries to keep the stagnant series (as well as the entire adventure genre) alive. I'm glad that they didn't make yet another embarrassing collection of inane mini-games and slapped Larry's name on it. I'm simply glad to discover that there are people who loved these games so much that they were determined to release a remake which, as they knew as well as anyone else, would never enter mainstream gaming the way the originals did. They created it out of passion, and that's a sentiment I appreciate most by game developers.

A lot of love was obviously put into this remake. They carefully preserved all the original's content and added some new stuff as well. The best part is decidedly the interaction. Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded has much more text than the earlier versions, with varied feedback to actions that are anything but essential to solving the game's puzzles. You'll get many more different responses from trying to use every item on every person you meet, circle through available actions in any situation, etc. There are many more funny comments, and even the old dialogues are greatly expanded.

There is a bit more content in the game world as well. For example, there are new minor characters in the casino, as well as a couple of new areas that weren't there before. One of these areas leads to a new girl with dialogues and a new set of puzzles, built in such a way that completing her arc is necessary to succeed in the final "confrontation". And all the dialogues are voiced, which is always a nice option to have.

The Bad
I feel bad criticizing this game, because it is essentially an independent effort that needed crowd funding to materialize, and it would be unrealistic to expect blockbuster production values from it. But if viewed objectively, regardless of budget and other similar considerations, this version loses to the first remake on all fronts.

The 1991 edition had cutting-edge graphics that aged gracefully. In this remake, they tried to recreate the style of Love for Sail, made five years afterwards. Unfortunately, it looks nowhere as appealing as that final installment in the classic series. Background graphics are annoyingly bright, there is something crude in the coloring, and artistically they are nowhere near any of the series' earlier installments. There is a severe lack of animation, and even the new versions of full-screen portraits of the girls are rather underwhelming, to say the least. It's a pity, but these graphics have very little of the charming aesthetics that made earlier games so attractive.

I dare say that even if this game managed to re-capture the visual magic of Love for Sail, it wouldn't matter any more. Seventeen years have passed, and cartoony 2D has long become a relic of the past. Probably they had serious budget constraints, but maybe cel-shaded 3D would have been a better idea. The remake we receive now looks like a barely adequate product from almost two decades ago, I don't quite see the necessity of being so uncompromisingly retro. I had similar feelings for the two Phantasy Star remakes: why was there a need to remake anything in an outdated visual style if the original versions were already top of the line for their respective epochs?

They added more responses and a few new puzzles. Alas, there is nothing particularly interesting in them, and one of the puzzles comes with an infuriating bug - a certain action leads to the desired outcome only if an invisible trigger has been activated before. I don't think Leisure Suit Larry needed any new puzzles. If it needed anything at all, it would probably be gameplay features that would make it closer to modern gaming. How cool would it be, for example, to navigate Larry through a seamless 3D Lost Wages, allowing him to physically interact with the environment? Or maybe I'm just having a foolish dream and that kind of game would be bound to fail. Maybe the old adventure style is completely incompatible with any achievement of modern gaming. In that case, I can only repeat the question: why did we even need a remake? And even more so, why did we need a remake of an already excellent remake?..

The Bottom Line
I was excited to try out this game, and I respect its creators for their dedication and their determination to keep the long-hibernating series above the surface. And yet, as sorry as I am to say it, I don't think it does justice to the earlier versions. This nostalgically appealing game needed major overhauls to fit modern standards, but instead what we have here is a slightly upgraded version with disappointing visuals and unnecessary extra content. As much as I wanted to like this remake, I cannot recommend it over the game's ultimate version in any way.

The Good
The music is jazzy and fits with the game look and feel. Funny. Clearly made with a lot of love.

The Bad
The graphics are mediocre. The interface is outdated. Confusing puzzles. Can be tiresome at points. Not a real challenge for those who played the original game.

The Bottom Line
I was a backer for the Leisure Suit Larry Kickstarter back in the day. In fact, it's the first Kickstarter game I've ever backed up. As a Sierra On-Line veteran, I couldn't let Al Lowe down by not chipping in reviving one of my childhood most fond memories.

But then again, when I last saw Larry it was over two decades ago. Everyone is familiar with the feeling of meeting an old buddy after years of absence, and then suddenly discovering that all you have to do together is talk about your past. Well, that's how I summarize my experience with Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded.

A remake of the first Leisure Suit Larry game, released at '91 - well, technically, the first LSL game was released at '87 and in `91 saw it's remake, but Reloaded is definitely based on the remake and not the original game - Reloaded takes place in Lost Wages, which is a parody of Las Vegas. The titular protagonist is Larry Laffer, a geeky, balding, 40 something years old and still a virgin. His quest in Lost Wages is to find love, or at least lose his virginity.

Faithful to the city it spoofs, Reloaded allows you to gamble around town, and in fact demands you doing so. Moving between locations in the city costs money, which can only be obtained by playing games of luck spread throughout the game world in the form of electronic gambling machines. Most of your playing time, especially if you never played the originals, will be spent in front of the these machines, desperately saving after every buck you make or restoring when losing.

All of the girls from the original game are here, plus a new one. When you do meet a girl, you need to perform a series of fetch quests for her. When you're done bringing her all of the stuff she wants, you can "get it" with her. Don't expect much, though. Larry games were never about showing you the hot-stuff.

The puzzles in the game aren't very hard, but most of them lack common sense. They're also pretty similar to the original game, which is for me a bit of a let down, as some parts of the game I managed to complete solely by remembering what I did decades ago.

Resolving puzzles in the game would've been more intuitive, or at least more entertaining, if it wasn't for the god awful, 90's Sierra game, interface. I actually did not remember how bad the interface actually was.

First of all, there aren't any hot-spots in the game, so prepare for a lot of pixel hunting. Second, for every action Larry can perform there's a separate icon in the interface. Even walking has it's own icon. Click on an object with the wrong icon and you might get a funny comment from the narrator, but certainty not the action you aimed for.

There was an attempt to improve the interface by introducing an action wheel, but it feels rushed out and inconvenient. In fact, Full Throttle, a LucasArts adventure game from 1996, did a far-better job with the action wheel concept.

The game is funny, there's no doubt about that. Josh Mandel, who worked for Sierra for many years, wrote the game dialogues and lines, and did a very good job. Almost everything in the game is intractable, and most of the interactions will reward you funny jokes and sexual innuendos. There's no doubt that this game was made with a lot of attention and love from it's creators.

Reloaded is an adventure game, so I did not expect splendid 3d visuals and scenery. Still, the level of graphics in the game is pretty mediocre, for a 2013 title, to say the least. The game screens, and there aren't many, are colorful but overall look static and lifeless. The characters are hand-drawn and look OK, but again - adventure games in the 2000's featured better looking characters and animation.

The music in Reloaded is very good. Larry games always had that jazzy vibe, and this remake is no difference. There are a lot of memorable scores in the game, and if you pledged enough money you can download the soundtrack from Replay Games website. The sound is also great. Everyone are voiced, and the guy who voices Larry is the same one who voiced him in Larry 6 and 7.

For me, Reloaded is nothing more then a redundant trip down to memory lane. It's true that the game can be entertaining at some points, mostly due to the game's sense of humor, but it still cannot overshadow the frustration from the monotonic gambling sequences, the terrible interface and illogical puzzles.

If you're over 25 and played the original game, you might get a kick of nostalgia when playing the game (good luck finishing it if you're running strictly on nostalgic fumes, though). However, if you did not play the original series or any other game from the Sierra library, I sincerely recommend on moving away from this title. If you crave for adventure games, there are far better then this one.