The premise of this game is so unbelievably funny to me that I had to eventually play it for myself. It is more in line with platformers like Shadow of the Beast, made five years later. It features some similar looking use of parallax scrolling, caves with branching parts to explore, and use of items and eventually combat with weapons to get through an island adventure. Only instead of some powerful warrior or monster or mascot, you're a comic book reading, video game playing, hoodie wearing dork with glasses who accidentally got loaded onto a cargo ship and ended up on a tropical island filled with native islanders and pirates.

The premise really does make it special, and got a lot of laughs out of me. His knees will get wobbly and he'll start defying your controls if you're presented with a situation too scary for him. He cried, he runs backwards, and he's very unhappy to be on this island at first. You also take serious fall damage without properly grabbing hold of the ledge as you drop down, and the controls are very difficult at first. As you get used to them, so does Lester. His animations change to be less afraid and more confident, and by the end of the game he's a swashbuckling Threepwood without all of the corny jokes.

Beyond it being a difficult game to work with and arguably not very good, there are other problems. Naturally being a tropical island adventure made in the 90s, it has some very.. inappropriate or I suppose orientalist ways of depicting pacific islanders. Barely clothed objects of affection, suspicious and aggressive warriors, leopard print clothing, etc. Not very nice. It's maybe the only thing that really drags the game down aesthetically, besides it sort of ending on a note of nerdy boy wish fulfillment instead of carrying the joke of him being a wimp the whole way. But it was still fun and got quite a bit of amusement out of me.

Many people have already seen this game through Youtubers like, I want to say it was the Angry Video Game Nerd, and he did a good job highlighting how silly and dumb the premise was. But I feel like without his own commentary and taking the game in for what it is, was a lot more meaningful of an experience. I'm really glad I played it, but I didn't get through the whole of it by myself, so I'm a little bit a tourist here, but less so than people who just watched someone else drag in in a short video. Not that I particularly dislike old AVGN or anything. Sometimes I yearn for those days again, and try to be my own AVGN now that he sold the soul of the channel. Saw it slowly die out and lose quality.

More and more I have wondered, worried, mulled over in my head just how bad or benign it is that so many take to videos to explain things for them, experience things for them, without people putting the initiative into trying it out for themselves. I'm sure my own habit of playing something, realizing it isn't for me, and then watching someone else finish the rest is frowned upon by a lot of other gamers who take these things more seriously than me. But lately with the impending death of Myrient, I've been more and more hoarding these old games and actually going out of my way to try them. Too boot them up, see something different, engage in an experience and enjoy myself. So then, I feel like any amount of time and interest one puts in these retro oddities is worthwhile. In its own way watching commentary, and in demoing it yourself, and in perhaps the most ideal way playing something you enjoy all the way through. I can hardly be upset if anyone shows even a mild interest in these sorts of old games.

So I hope other people with an interest in the past, in retro games, SNES, and other consoles take a look at the landscape of gaming and preservation now. Wade their feet into the waters of emulation, or find someone they love to watch who's been swimming in the deep end. Find something silly, find something dumb, and just experience it. It may not always be so easy to play these games in the future, even if we think the internet is forever, entropy inevitably will each everything. The escalation of AI inflating the costs of server space and even the capacity to buy a computer, a more nationally divided, monitored and censored internet, and other problems are all too close for comfort.

I apologize for getting so serious in a review for a game called Lester the Unlikely; I didn't find it so likely it would stir up these feelings in me so deeply. But since Myrient announced it was shutting down (it is getting backed up by a new group so its okay), I've been trying to scrounge up as many things I've wanted to play as I possibly could. A small collection to carry me for years at least, a bunch of interesting things to look into, even if I never give any the full experience they deserve. And how could I? There are thousands and thousands of old games, and if I dedicate my life to it, I will still never see the bottom. It makes me wish sometimes that I was immortal. From my hysteria of backing things up and finding more, this slipped from the pile of SNES games right into my lap. It was too silly.. How could I not? Out of all the games on the system, it was quite unlikely..

Mar 14, 2026