Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places)

Larry Laffer thought he had it all when he finally hooked up with Eve after his night out on the town in Lost Wages, figuring that he might as well move in with her in beautiful Los Angeles. Sadly, it seems as though Larry's jumped the gun, as Eve wasn't looking for anything but a one-night stand, and Larry's left on his own with barely a dollar to spend on the streets of L.A. Thanks to a lucky investment, Larry's luck turns right around again, as within minutes he not only wins a luxurious cruise with Barbara Bimbo on The Dating Connection, but a million dollars to spend via the Luck-o Buck-o Lottery, and sets sail to see if he might find the love of his life on his new adventure...assuming he doesn't get caught by the mad Dr. Nonokee or the KGB, having unwillingly involved himself in an international espionage incident and wound up with an immeasurably valuable onklunk in his hands.

Such is the plot of Leisure Suit Larry goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places), Al Lowe's successful sequel to his previous hit, Leisure Suit Larry In The Land Of The Lounge Lizards. While the game continues the story right where the first one leaves off, there are a couple of notable changes to the format: Instead of adventuring around one city, Larry's travels take him from Los Angeles, to a cruise boat, to a tropical island, to another island via a plane, all in sequence, with no chance to backtrack between locations. The linear plot was written so that players wouldn't have to swap disks every ten minutes, but in practice, it also meant that the game was notoriously easy to get into an Unwinnable state, forcing many players to start all over.

Another noticable change was in the game's tone compared to its predecessor: Sierra wanted the game to be more accessible, believing the first game's sales to have suffered thanks to its status as a "porno game", so for Larry 2, much of the sexual content was nowhere to be found, and instead of looking for quick and easy sex, Larry's on a quest to find true love instead. Fans of the first game didn't like the shift in tone very much.

Despite sharing many of the attributes that made Sierra games shine, Larry 2 is mostly remembered today not for its funny writing or clever puzzles (even though those can be found in the game), but mostly for its unfair and maddening difficulty, along with a final puzzle that's notorious for requiring a very specific command because of a last-minute programming error.