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, like many I'm assuming, found out about this thanks to James Rolfe's/AVGN's video on the game from several years ago. I already knew I'd play it one day for curiosity sake, and upon learning that it's only 40-50 minutes long, I figured now was a time as any considering how many other cinematic platformers I went through.

And to start, I actually don't think it controls that badly. Not on the same realms of smoothness and reliability as its contemporaries in this time period such as Another World or Flashback, granted, but the weight and arc of the jump are pretty easy to grow accustomed to, along with the general speed of Lester to be just right. I also appreciate a detail not a whole lot of games were attempting at the time, which is how Lester starts of as a scared piss-ass wimp, to becoming more confident once you hit the halfway point, never really hesitating to perform jumps or seeing enemies, culminating in fighting with pirates even! Of course, this begs the question of how this dude can swim all the way to the island's beach yet pisses himself at the mere sight of a crab, but eh.

Still, I did give it a 2/5 - or with my preferred scale, 4/10 - and that's cause while conceptually this game sounds pretty cool, everything else besides the controls aren't up to par, and it falls under one of media's cardinal sin: being utterly boring.

Like damn, this is one of the most plain ass 2D platformers I've ever played thus far. Nothing about it really sticks out in some manner, least of all the presentation. I get that the game takes place in a tropical island with beaches, forests populated with tribal people (that thankfully don't ride on harmful stereotypes too much), and caverns, but the drab color palette doesn't really invoke a strong sense of atmosphere, and the way the wildlife and humans are crafted is ugly. Lester and the pirates in particular look sunburnt as hell, eesh. Also, though I found his one example to be pretty weak, I do agree with Rolfe in that a number of objects needed to progress do tend to blend too well with the background, in the sense that they're so ordinary that I wouldn't think to use them until I refer to the longplay video I have on standby, a candle needed to burn something in the tribal village being one instance. There's also the music, which is so annoyingly high-pitched and overreliant on the same percussion and brass instrumentals with the same 2-3 song repeats, it makes post-2006 Dragon Quest scores Sugiyama composed sound like grand operas.

The levels themselves are like, fine? They're designed competently enough but again, they don't really stick out well due to underutilized setpieces and unique puzzles There's a section you do where you're chased by an animal, and have to run and jump across using vines in time to escape it. Despite the finnicky nature of maintaining the distance between you and the animal, the is one of very few moments I can recall the game actually pushing its mold out instead of sitting inside it. Most of the time the structure of a level actually tends to loop as well, and I don't mean that as a joke, I mean they tend to use most if not all of the same layout and enemy placements when going through them, a couple being super blatant about it. On the note of enemies, not that many enemies pose that much of a threat surprisingly enough, the only times they become that way is when they just drop them on you, like in one section with moving across water via wooden rafts, there are snakes you can just barely see at the very top of the screen. I'm also not really sure where this trial-and-error aspect the people who played this say, cause it's super sparse in this aspect too. There's only like... 4, probably, that can be classified as this, usually it's rudimentary sidescrolling gameplay, or being extremely tedious like having to go back-and-forth in a hostile-free environment just to make sure the right switch is activated to open a door, or having to deal with a stupidly fast spider as you throw a boomerang to a web-covered outing to escape the cave.

Honestly, I can see why Rolfe structured the video the way he did. Sure, he gave the game a harsher light that it didn't exactly deserve, but considering the mundane nature, it'd make for a more entertaining video. Not to mention he at least makes it clear - at least relatively speaking to bad YTers that play off obviously poor performance as ""jokes"" - that it's all just for entertainment purpose. As for Lester himself, he supposedly would've come back from the way the end credits is rolled out for a new game, which is funny cause I can't really think of anything else this nerdy boy can tackle.

btw this has one of the lamest title drops I've ever seen. It couldn't even get THAT right, smh.

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

Contrary to my upcoming AVGN-clone series' episode on this, I don't entirely hate this game. I think this game absolutely needed another half-year of polishing. The game's hard and sometimes straight up unfair (snakes falling from the sky, anyone?), but I see a lot of ambition to make something really campy and charming. Lester the Unlikely is a game that chews you up and spits you out, but sadly not in the Castlevania way. It's much more rigid and frustrating to slog through, with controls that you CAN get used to, but you would just have more fun picking up any other game from that year. The music is forgettable at worst, and kind of memorable at best. I enjoyed seeing Lester get a confidence boost and gain an ACTUAL WEAPON, I enjoyed the feeling of finally getting a level over with, and even some cool stuff like the jaguar chase scene and the absolutely FUCKIN' BONKERS ending, but the game simply isn't worth trudging through. Watch a playthrough if your curiosity peaks.

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.