Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded, a new game available today, was funded through Kickstarter. And its creators are very grateful to their backers.
Perhaps a little too grateful.
This remake of the 1987 PG-13 adventure game starring a sleazy 40-year-old virgin has a variety of upgrades, from HD cartoon graphics to new puzzles and locations. What it also has is a never-ending parade of references to the Kickstarter campaign that started it all. Head into Lefty's Bar at the game's onset, and what used to be a room sparsely populated with nondescript generic patrons with their backs to the player is now a larger group of people all facing front; these are the likenesses of big-money Kickstarter backers who paid to have their faces in the game. Walk outside and the bum selling apples is another backer. Even the dog who pees on your leg is somebody's real-life dog.
Walk into the cabaret and the sultry singer, played by Melora Hardin (The Office), sings a torch song for her true love – "equity crowdfunding."
Leisure Suit Larry is not a particularly content-rich game by today's standards; much of the challenge of the original came from the fact that the player had to enter in commands via a text parser and thus had to guess a lot about what to do. More of the challenge came from the fact that you could easily dead-end the game if you did the wrong thing or solved puzzles out of order. In the remake, neither of those elements are present – you use a point-and-click interface, so it's easier to determine what is and is not interactive, and the puzzles have been reworked so that you cannot hit a dead end.
So the constant references to the method by which Leisure Suit Larry came to be funded make up a pretty noticeable portion of the game. The backers who paid to have their faces in the crowd weren't rewarded with subtle Easter Eggs but with realistic likenesses that stick out like sore thumbs.
To be sure, without these high-paying crowdfunders the game might not exist at all, and one can understand why Replay Games might be overflowing with expressions of gratitude.
But where does the Kickstarter reward stop and the game begin? Larry Reloaded is a weird hybrid of both. For the over 14,000 people who donated money to see the long-dead series come back to life, this is a celebration of their efforts. But for anyone who buys the game now, without knowledge of the campaign, the constant references to Kickstarter will seem out of place.
Would a game funded by traditional means feature the publisher's CEO as an on-screen drunk? Actually, wait, the original Larry did just that with Sierra On-Line founder Ken Williams. And come to think of it, cheeky in-jokes about Sierra were always a hallmark of the classic games. So this isn't totally out of character for the series.
Offering rewards above and beyond the satisfaction of knowing you helped a product get to market seems crucial to successful Kickstarter campaigns, especially those on the scale of game development. Some buyers may act entirely altruistically, but would there be enough of them? Rewards are a win-win; the backer can feel like they're getting more of a return on their investment and the project creator can get more money out of them. But Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded might be an illustration by negative example of how rewards and product might need to be distinct entities.
Reloaded is a fun trip back in time to aggravating point-and-click puzzles and juvenile sex humor. I laughed a few times at some of the new material. But it's something of a tease. For those who've been waiting for original series creator Al Lowe to return to the Larry series, this isn't going to be quite what they're looking for – did we really need a remake of the first game? What Replay Games should do with the assets they've created so far is a proper sequel, something totally new.
And if it does Kickstart such a game, Replay Games may want to consider dialing back on the "your face in the game!" rewards.
