Leisure Suit Larry 1 - Land of the Lounge Lizards

Larry Laffer wakes up in Los Angeles with no money, no car, and no chance of anything better. So he does the only sensible thing — he goes looking for a girl. Leisure Suit Larry is a point-and-click adventure from Sierra On-Line from 1987, which takes every transparent t-shirt and wiggle it can find from the first day of the internet, and throws them at the escort services in the city's most luxurious corners.

You walk through the game by clicking on the screen — typical for adventures of that era. You collect items, talk to people, solve logical puzzles. But the game's spark isn't in what you do, it's in how the game makes fun of it. Every NPC has a line that will either entertain you or not — and here everything depends on whether you like humor that looks like it was pulled straight from a nineties advertisement. The puzzles aren't hard, they're more of an excuse for flirting and jokes. The controls are straightforward, but the graphics surprisingly hold up better than you'd expect — these pixelated, sloppy characters have exactly the right porousness.

Larry had to arrive a season before the internet lost its innocence. The game doesn't shy away from sex — everything is shouted, blinking, a little pathetic, and that's exactly its charm. It's not pornography — it's more like male fantasy fed on television commercials and strip shows. Today it looks ridiculous, back then it must have been surprising.

Mechanically, the game hasn't changed. It's still a slow click-click-click, conversations with precise text you have to guess right. And yes, on the 35th attempt you'll figure out that you were supposed to look at three things in the room in that specific order. Archaic, but as a concentration exercise it works.

Today you can play it in an emulator and discover why it was called cult. It's not a great work of art. It's humor on the edge of decency dressed up as a logic game that doesn't need to prove anything. If you enjoy humor that's a bit rougher and you're not bothered by the fact that everything is kind of sleazy, then play it.