Adventures of Lolo

Voices of: N/A
Developer: HAL Laboratory
Designer: N/A
Rating: E
Genre: Puzzle, Action
System: NES
1989

Times Completed:
Tim: 1

Summary: Lolo must travel up 50 dangerous floors to confront King Egger, who kidnapped Princess Lala.

Review:
Tim: I love Adventures of Lolo. I rented the game once when I was a kid and the puzzles were addictive, but too challenging for me. I can't remember how far I got (decently far, if memory serves), but I don't think I was able to finish the game before I had to return it (renting games, really showing my age here). I never forgot my experience with Lolo and as an adult, I finally got to complete the game, thanks to Nintendo's Online Service. The game is great fun, throwing 50 different puzzle floors at you. It's really a nice action/puzzle hybrid, with the emphasis really on puzzles.

I actually enjoyed the simplistic, straightforward story. It's not just about solving puzzles, you have to save Princess Lala! Your foe is the evil King Egger, who has the captured Princess at the top of a tower. The story is basic, but it adds an extra edge to the game. You have to keep moving, to save the Princess! Along with the simplistic story, the character design is beautiful in its simplicity as well. Lolo is basically a blue round dot, and Lala is a pink/red round dot with a bow. The character design works, though, and they're memorable. It makes me smile to think about Lolo on his adventure, this small spherical blue character.

The puzzle design is excellent. The game isn't always challenging, but there were a few levels that really took a bit of brainpower to figure out. I flew threw many floors and definitely struggled with a few. That's the fun of the game, though. Going, "Wait a minute... how?" and then thinking through, figuring it out. It's one of the great, underdiscussed aspects of video games. It's not just mindless button pressing. So many of them throw puzzles at the players- you really need to use your brain to figure them out. In each room, Lolo needs to grab multiple hearts to open a treasure chest, which causes the monsters in the room to disappear and the stairs to the next floor to open. The game's design plays with this simplistic premise in wonderfully complicated ways. Lolo might need to drag blocks to block monsters, smash rocks, use ladders to cross rivers, turn enemies into eggs and drag them around, etc. There's a nice amount of complexity to the different challenges, verses repeating similar ones over and over. I never got tired of the challenges- each one required something slightly different, or a variation of a previous solution. It definitely challenged your brain. I will say that I never looked up the solution to any of the puzzles- the closest I came was trying to understand the role that the grass plays. I was stuck on a level where these green lizard things chase you. I knew what I had to do, but I wasn't clear on how the mechanics worked. I did look up to see that they can't go on grass, which allowed me to figure out how to solve the puzzle. Floor 9-4 (floor 44 by my count) probably gave me the biggest challenge. The answer is somewhat obvious in retrospect, but I simply did not see it. It took me quite a while, a lot of trial-and-error to finally puzzle out the solution. While it felt insane that I couldn't immediately grasp it, I knew the answer was close and I had a lot of fun slowly getting closer and closer. The final floor, 50 was really cool, too. I fairly quickly figured out how to solve it- actually doing it took some practice, though. The sense of accomplishment was strong, though. I loved being able to complete all 50 puzzles and reach the end.

Adventures of Lolo is definitely one of the best NES puzzle games. I know a whole trilogy was created and it's part of a larger Japanese series of games. It stands as a great reminder that you don't need fancy graphics and long narratives to tell a powerful story or build a great game. This game challenged players and provided a ton of especially fun puzzles to figure out. I'm a huge fan of this game, which is one of HAL Laboratory's most underrated gems. I wish the franchise was more broadly known and that that they'd revive it at some point- I'd play every Lolo game I could get my hands on.



Rating 1-10
Tim's Rating: N/A



If You Enjoyed This Game, We Recommend: Adventures of Lolo 2, Wrecking Crew, Yoshi