Adventures of Lolo (1989)

The fifth entry of the Eggerland series was the first to release in North America. Adventures of Lolo is a puzzle game where you play as a round blue creature named Lolo who is on a quest to save Princess Lala who has been kidnapped by King Egger and is being held at the top of his castle. The player must progress through all 10 floors to save her.

Each floor is divided into 5 levels. The objective of each level is to collect all the heart pieces to unlock a chest that contains a gem that will unlock the door to the next level while avoiding deadly creatures, earning special abilities, and pushing blocks.

I will unashamedly admit I used a guide to solve every level. My brain was not big enough to think 3-5 steps ahead so I just enjoyed following instructions to survive traps I would not have foreseen until it was too late. I would recommend this game to puzzle and retro game lovers.

Adventures of Lolo is a great NES game, both underrated and overlooked. As a puzzle game, it is quite simple in its premise but also rather difficult in its execution. It features 50 single-stage levels, state-of-the-art graphic (not really) and a top-down view. As a design choice, the top view of each stage gives the player all the information needed to solve the puzzle before making the first move. The goal of the game is to move blocks, and use a couple of basic mechanics, to avoid enemies and gather objects scattered through the level that our hero will need at once in order to materialize the exit pathway. Here, the hardship of the game stems from the necessity of performing the needed actions in a specific order. There's not really much room for corrections of an incorrect strategy especially in the later levels. If you make the wrong move you may have to die and restart the level. And after you loose all your lives, the game-over screen brings you back to the start of the current floor, possibly as far as 5 stages before the deadly one. This is quite definitely punishing and possibly frustrating. But it is a staple of the time, where being hard used to be a characteristic of many games. It also forces the player to think ahead of time as, in the original setting, there's no room for attempts.

The enemies are varied enough to have some interesting properties and add a bit of depth to the very simple block-moving mechanic. They are there to block pathways and make every move a risky one if not taken with precaution. This is not a run and gun game. Moves have to be though out and measured. On the artistic side, while the art and graphic is good enough, the music can get repetitive after a while. There's no variety. After a while it becomes a thing of nightmares. Something that nags you in your sleep. There's also a background story leading the progress of the game, a save-the-princess story, what else! It's basically Legend of Zelda with blocks. Anyway, this is a brilliant puzzle game, a fun and captivating one. A must-try for every puzzle-lover. The following two chapters are also basically the same game, just more stages of it. In today's terms they would be considered a paid expansion. Worth trying out if the first game was of one's enjoyment.

I don't have a ton of nostalgia for the 8-bit era of gaming. As a kid, I remember playing and enjoying SMB 1-3, Kirby's Adventure, Duck Hunt and Bubble Bobble. Outside of that, most of my childhood NES memories are of disappointing rentals and stupid difficulty.

So when Nintendo announced that Switch Online subscribers would get a bunch of free NES games, my reaction was pretty "meh." There were 14 games I'd already played, 14 more I had no interest in playing...

And Adventures of Lolo.

Developed by HAL Laboratory, Adventures of Lolo is a block-sliding puzzle game with just a pinch of top-down adventure mechanics (dodging enemy attacks, for example). Your goal is to block or dodge enemies to collect all the hearts in a room. Collecting hearts unlocks a chest containing the key to the room's exit. Every five rooms you ascend a floor, and there are ten floors total.

This game is a good fit for a handheld console. The floors aren't very long, and they are mostly brain teasers, so it's nice to pick up and play one or two. It's best enjoyed with modern conveniences like save states... without those, you get a few retries until Game Over, at which point you get a password you can use to skip to where you were.

Like a lot of early games, enemies and obstacles aren't really explained, so you'll usually die once or twice just figuring out what the constraints of levels are. But once you get a sense of what you can and cannot do and what the properties of the various characters and power-ups are, it's really quite fun. Nothing mind-blowing, but it's aged better than a lot of NES titles have.

But now that I've completed it, I guess I just have to hope that those SNES on Switch Online rumors are true...