After the explosive events of his last adventure, Larry Laffer has ended up on the island of Cancúm. After a recap and a quick controls tutorial you're off on Larry's next dubious adventure, ably assisted by Pi, the virtual assistant built in to your PiPhone (like Siri only funnier, sexier and more insulting.)
Mr Wang is the evil mastermind trying to take over the world this time, by taking control of Larry's former company Prune, and Larry finds himself in a race to find his girlfriend Faith, who ran Prune until her disappearance. Prune is a company remarkably like Apple, only smaller, wrinklier, and with more killer sex robots in development.
There are several mentions of characters, events and in-jokes from Larry's previous adventure (Wet Dreams Don't Dry) so if you haven't played it you may feel like you're missing out on something, but you're probably not.
Early on you meet Governor Bobbi Marley (get it?) but could she also possibly be descendant of Governor Elaine Marley–Threepwood from the Monkey Island games? I think it's a distinct possibility as that at the end of this game they mercilessly copy Day of the Tentacle Remastered's retro Maniac Mansion section, and there are also few other homages, most notably to the classic console game Pitfall and Rutger Hauer's unforgettable death in Blade Runner—I just hope enough players 'get' them and the frequent in-jokes.
It'd be naive to criticise a Leisure Suit Larry game for being tacky, but at times it seems like the game was an exercise in making as many objects as they could look phallic or like ladyparts, but I could be wrong. Whatever the case I always have a good look around just to check. Fortunately you don't have to hover the pointer over every single object to see if they're interactive, you can scroll through all the useful objects with the triggers–which would be great if it worked properly, but much like Larry it only works when it feels like it, so you'll still have to have a good look around every screen to make sure you don't miss anything interactive or useful.
The game plays in an old-school, rather clunky way (designed for mouse and not particularly well optimised for an analogue controller) and does nothing automatically, for instance at one point you enter a code to unlock a safe and have to back out of the phone before you can search the safe–surely it's obvious what you want to do, having entered the correct code and shouldn't the game be friendly and intelligent enough to know that? On the good side, there's a handy shoulder button shortcut to scroll through your inventory and you can double-tap 'A' to get to exit a screen quickly, but that's about it as far as being console user-friendly.
In order to save Faith and recover her memory you have to take her to a magical cavern. Hundreds of years ago a group of intrepid explorers including Captain Muffington, the Marquis de Connard, Regibald Cockburn and Lady Gobbledick discovered the Cavern of Cosmic Cognition which needed a keystone in order to enter. When they left in order to protect the Cavern's secrets they broke the keystone into 4 pieces which got lost over time, and yep, you have to find them.
The last LSL game I played was Box Office Bust, which had open world (well, a movie studio backlot) sandbox gameplay with exploration, platforming, racing and puzzle-solving, along with plenty of sexual innuendo and scantily clad women–and while in retrospect it was truly awful, it actually felt like the franchise had evolved. This latest instalment has the classic Larry-look and style, with extremely basic in-game animation and cutscenes, most of the time spent on animation clearly went on making boobs bounce and sway–so kudos for that.
The game has an autosave feature but you'd be wise to use the manual save function too, you can't 'get stuck' per se, but you may want to replay a section for achievements, I can't think of any other reason for replaying the game, unless pixellated cleavages and groan-worthy humour are your thing. There are a few clever puzzles in the game and a couple of frustrating maze sections, but apart from those you should finish Wet Dreams Dry Twice in 7-10 hours.
I'm not going to be too hard on Larry or get too anal, as I'm glad developers are still making games that might ruffle a few feathers in this painfully woke, politically correct world, but although there a few laughs along the way the sexism, corny jokes and double entendres do wear thin. Many of the women give as good as they get, and you should know what you're in for when buying a game in this series. Other than possibly being even kinkier than before I don't think it does anything new or inventive, which is a shame when you see how some games have moved the point & click genre on.
Special thanks to Mark Allen PR for the review code.