did a 1CC clear after first beating the game.

Lester the Unlikely is a very peculiar game. It feels kinda like a midway point between cinematic platformers like Another World, and more traditional platformers... at times kinda feeling like the worst of both worlds, lol. The story is nothing special, it has some questionable narrative/presentation choices, and the gameplay is incredibly trial-and-error focused (it took me 11 Game Overs before I finally beat the game. No save states here). But, all things considered, it's not thaaaaaat bad a game. I was able to get some degree of enjoyment out of it.

The best thing I can say about Lester the Unlikely, is that it is a remarkable example of featuring a protagonist, who grows and develops as a character, over the course of the game. I don't just mean in terms of narrative, but even as far as gameplay is concerned, Lester changes as a character. He starts the game off being afraid of everything, but gradually becomes more confident, and that shows through in both the story, and the game design. Even his sprite changes, reflecting his better posture in the late-game. This is something that many games of today don't even do, let alone games from 1994.

To be clear, Lester the Unlikely is not a great, or even good game, by any means. But it's an interesting curiosity, and I do think it has something going for it. If you wanna check it out - go ahead, lol.

Lester the Unlikely is a strange game in the way that I can't exactly tell who it's supposed to be for. People who play games primarily for the power fantasies they provide (like the early 2010s game reviewers who helped this game go down in infamy) are going to get alienated by the fact that they have to play as a wimpy loser with awkward controls. And people looking for something deeper (don't know why they'd look here but whatever) are going to get alienated by the fact that it still is fundamentally a power fantasy. At the end of the day, Lester still defeats a bunch of pirates, gets the girl, and saves an indigenous tribe in a weirdly colonialist narrative.
So really, Lester the Unlikely is the same as the countless shitty SNES/Genesis platformers with awkward controls, bad level design, and screen crunch. The only difference is that this time, it's "ironic" in the most superficial way possible. All I'm saying is that if this game came out today, I could totally see Lester saying Whedonisms like "Well that just happened" or "That sounded better in my head."

(I was originally going to make a shitpost review about how this was the Citizen Kane of gaming but then I realized that writing a semi-serious review of this shit would be even funnier than any shitpost I could possibly make about it)

I'll admit, it's a fairly interesting concept. Having a video game protagonist in a platformer that doesn't have superpowers, guns, or any other extraordinary abilities is unorthodox, especially for the 16-bit era. However, in executing that gimmick, it's UNLIKELY that this game was going to be exemplary. It almost verges on being purposefully bad. Lester is incredibly fragile and controlling him feels like shit. His movement has to be meticulously executed or else he'll get hurt, mostly from the amount of jumping you'll do. It's like the developers had the players in mind when making this game as if YOU were in a platforming game with nothing but the shirt on your back. Isn't this a tad presumptuous, Visual Concepts? What do you take me for? You'd never catch me running away from a fucking turtle.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com