The tedious act of recovering Lost Wages

It turns out that the name Leisure Suit Larry has become an ironic title, as the cold reality of the game’s resource management tasks set in and reloading the game to fill your wallet becomes a painful chore. Again and again you scurry off to refill hapless Larry’s wallet at one of many electronic gambling machines, where luck rather than skill determines how quickly you can move through the game. Do you spend time walking outside and receiving a $10 gift from a homeless man when you’ve gone broke or do you simply “cheat” and reload the last save, from when you actually still had money to gamble?

The blame isn’t entirely on N-Fusion Interactive or publisher Replay Games. To be fair, going broke in the original Sierra title meant a game over and forced reload. Turning the clock back is much more of a voluntary act here, since that same homeless fellow will keep feeding you a sawbuck every time you bottom out. Instead of being forced to reload, you simply want to because it’s so horribly dull to keep betting your $10 and losing it, over and over, until you hit a long enough string of jackpots to fill your wallet anew. The difference now is that you feel like you’re cheating every time.

There are other strange design choices here as well. Increasing your bet can only be done in $1 increments, each of which requires a single click, since holding down the mouse button brings up a radial menu for swapping between the different pointer commands. It’s a redundant feature, since you can also use your scrollwheel, your right mouse button, or a drop-down menu at the top of the screen to switch. Then there’s the lack of quick-save/quick-load buttons, forcing you to dive through a series of menus every time you want to recover your lost dollars.

If you’re wondering you’ve just spent three paragraphs reading about a story-driven adventure game’s slot machines, it’s because of how much time you spend staring at them. Larry’s money is constantly trickling away as you play, whether you’re spending it on cabs, on booze, on paying for an ill-advised wedding, and on any number of other things. You need it, and you’ll need considerably more in the end than the paltry $100 you start with. Gambling is a requirement.

This was a poor choice in the original game and it remains a poor choice now. The lingering importance of gambling in the game is frustrating, but it also speaks to the bigger issues at play in Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded. There’s a failure of design, but there’s also a creative miscalculation. Replay’s successful Kickstarter campaign for Reloaded could have delivered a re-born Larry for a 21st century audience, but little has been done to fix what was fundamentally broken before.

The finished product here feels more like a direct port of the VGA remake from the ’90s with a new skin on top of it. Fan service is valuable, but Larry felt uneven in 1987. N-Fusion could have gotten away with taking some creative license here and there to deliver a more fun game instead of just an HD re-release. There’s new content in the form of an extra woman to spurn Larry’s advances, and the point-and-click play continues to be charming, but the hoop-jumping progression through the story hinges too much on luck rather than the player’s powers of deduction. More information about the program is available on the web site at www.happmart.com.