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LEMMINGS (AMI)
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Publisher: Psygnosis.
Developer: DMA Design. Released: February 1991. Genre: Puzzle. Other versions: VARIOUS. Posted 24th December 2024. By Tom Clare © 2024 |
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Before finding success (and no little controversy) with Grand Theft Auto, DMA Design had already secured their place in gaming folklore, having developed one of the most iconic, fiendish puzzlers there’s ever been. For a video game high on difficulty, slow-paced and heavily reliant on planning skills, Lemmings was an unusually unifying experience. Those growing up in the nineties may have remembered playing it on one of the countless consoles or home computers it appeared on, or even in school. My class would gather around the Acorn version at break times, its tricky logic allowing for a surprisingly engrossing team exercise. Pupils offered suggestions, whilst we jotted down the passwords as a badge of honour, marking our progression. As a consequence, even those who have a less active interest in gaming, often have fond memories of Lemmings.
With good reason, too. Lemmings is a magnificent puzzle game. The premise is reasonably simple, albeit ultimately playing host to some brain-meltingly difficult scenarios. Each level sees up to 100 lemmings dropping from a hatch, with the player’s task being to guide a minimum percentage of them to the safety of the exit. Sounds easy right? You’ll very quickly find that it’s anything but. Using the cursor, the player must assign activities or abilities to one or many lemmings, to change the landscape and create a path that a) sees them reach the exit and b) does sacrifice large numbers of them along the way. Some levels require little more than bashing through walls, building a bridge or mining through the ground. The tricky part comes in when the game adds hazards.
Lemmings is a work of art when you've fashioned a route forward
Presumably based around the myth of the rodent creatures marching off cliffs, the difficulty lies in stopping them from plunging to their deaths or blundering into traps, as danger lurks everywhere. The player can deploy blockers or come up with creative means to prevent a haemorrhaging of lemmings, but often, they’ll get into trouble if you aren’t alert to their behaviours. For example, lemmings can only withstand falls of a certain height without the aid of an umbrella to parachute them. Equipping a lemming with the climb ability might result in them scaling the perimeters of levels, before falling to their deaths.
Lemmings is an immensely cerebral experience, its pacing considerably gentler than the increasingly frenzied challenge of Tetris or Pipe Mania. You can play for an hour coasting through a dozen levels, or alternatively spend the time devising new approaches to tackle one particularly evil stage. In both instances, the time flies and it’s an incredibly rewarding mental workout. The feeling of accomplishment when you beat some of the harder levels is almost unrivalled. Even the early stages, designed to acclimate the player to the various features, gift the player a warm glow when you pull off a strategy that rescues all the lemmings.
Lemmings is an immensely cerebral experience, its pacing considerably gentler than the increasingly frenzied challenge of Tetris or Pipe Mania. You can play for an hour coasting through a dozen levels, or alternatively spend the time devising new approaches to tackle one particularly evil stage. In both instances, the time flies and it’s an incredibly rewarding mental workout. The feeling of accomplishment when you beat some of the harder levels is almost unrivalled. Even the early stages, designed to acclimate the player to the various features, gift the player a warm glow when you pull off a strategy that rescues all the lemmings.
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As the difficulty begins to climb, it’s easy to appreciate the diversity and complexity of the environments. There are dozens of unique layouts, and it’s cool on the rare occasions you do return to a familiar scenario. With fewer abilities at your disposal, and the demand for a greater lemming survival rate, these typically require a totally different solution to that which worked earlier. You’ll need to make use of the pause function, as some levels have multiple opening hatches, or require the player to quickly allot and change the tasks of a single lemming.
It’s a deceptively pretty game. Tiny sprites tended not to impress at the time of release, but the animations look lovely and are incredibly smooth. Having as many as one hundred critters on screen at once is awesome. There are a bunch of themes evoking various periods and styles. The ‘Heaven’ stages with the fiery lava flows and the foreboding forests make for two especially evocative visits. Menus are inviting and easy to navigate, with the player able to try their hand from the beginning of four different sets of 30 levels, depending on the size of the headache you’re after. Two-player split-screen meanwhile pits two friends against each other across a further 20 purpose-built stages in a bid to see who can rescue the most of their respective team’s lemmings. It’s surprisingly good fun.
It’s a deceptively pretty game. Tiny sprites tended not to impress at the time of release, but the animations look lovely and are incredibly smooth. Having as many as one hundred critters on screen at once is awesome. There are a bunch of themes evoking various periods and styles. The ‘Heaven’ stages with the fiery lava flows and the foreboding forests make for two especially evocative visits. Menus are inviting and easy to navigate, with the player able to try their hand from the beginning of four different sets of 30 levels, depending on the size of the headache you’re after. Two-player split-screen meanwhile pits two friends against each other across a further 20 purpose-built stages in a bid to see who can rescue the most of their respective team’s lemmings. It’s surprisingly good fun.
We all need a place to call Home
We cannot mention Lemmings without giving kudos to the sound design, which is brilliantly weird in a way that only British games of the time could have been. The lemmings themselves are, of course, the stuff of both dreams and nightmares with their pitchy cries of “let’s go!” and “Oh no!”, with satisfying popping sound effects and the all-important three blips indicating a builder is about to reach the end of their task. The music is the work of a mad genius. Excellent original compositions, such as the laid-back accompaniment to ‘Smile if you Love Lemmings’, prove a lovely fit. Even the energetic earworms do the job admirably. These BGMs co-exist seamlessly alongside reimaginings of classical works and nursery rhymes. ‘Twang’ is one of the strangest songs you’ll ever hear: a zany fusion of what appears to be ‘Ten Green Bottles’, Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ and Wagner’s ‘Bridal Chorus’. Somehow, the song’s pacey tempo and flat Amiga synths make it work. Add to this a groovy version of “How Much is That Doggy in the Window?’ and an atmospheric reworking of Tchaikovsky's ‘Dance of the Reed Flutes’ and you’ve one of the oddest, most brilliant soundtracks in gaming. The only track that doesn’t work is ‘Menace’, an ear-melting attempt at heavy metal that the Amiga, and your ears, are quite ill-equipped to handle.
Lemmings misses out on a perfect score due to inelegant solutions to some of its puzzles. For nearly 50 of its 120 levels, it’s more or less perfect, as challenges take some brain-power but make complete sense when you execute a plan. After this point, some regrettably feel like they’re resorting to back-door tactics, requiring the exploitation of quirks in the game’s physics. It’s never a great sign when a solution makes you think “How the heck was I ever meant to come up with that?”. Building a bridge just high enough to walk over but low enough that it triggers the builder to double back first, or mining through the bottom of a staircase at such a precise point that you don’t leave a sliver of it remaining on either side to block your lemmings passage through. Alternatively, having four or five lemmings build bridges a pixel apart to form a makeshift wall. These are incredibly hard to stumble across, and often difficult to make happen even when you know what you’re aiming for. It’s important to note that this doesn’t afflict all the levels, but as things get harder, the worry becomes whether the answer is hiding in plain sight, or impossibly obscure.
Lemmings misses out on a perfect score due to inelegant solutions to some of its puzzles. For nearly 50 of its 120 levels, it’s more or less perfect, as challenges take some brain-power but make complete sense when you execute a plan. After this point, some regrettably feel like they’re resorting to back-door tactics, requiring the exploitation of quirks in the game’s physics. It’s never a great sign when a solution makes you think “How the heck was I ever meant to come up with that?”. Building a bridge just high enough to walk over but low enough that it triggers the builder to double back first, or mining through the bottom of a staircase at such a precise point that you don’t leave a sliver of it remaining on either side to block your lemmings passage through. Alternatively, having four or five lemmings build bridges a pixel apart to form a makeshift wall. These are incredibly hard to stumble across, and often difficult to make happen even when you know what you’re aiming for. It’s important to note that this doesn’t afflict all the levels, but as things get harder, the worry becomes whether the answer is hiding in plain sight, or impossibly obscure.
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It’s a small blemish, however, on a goliath of a game that has enough levels to last even committed puzzlers for months. The thinking-person’s thinking game, Lemmings is little short of a masterpiece, and one of the greatest tests of mental dexterity. Beating it is like gaming’s Everest. Though a few have tried to ape its vision, none have come close to matching the sparkling gameplay and precision of design. At its best, utterly engrossing.
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VERDICT
"A supreme test of problem-solving and strategy, Lemmings will go down as one of gaming's greatest puzzlers, even if the methods behind solving some of its tougher levels can seem incredibly obscure." OVERALL: 9/10 |
OTHER FIENDISH PUZZLE GAMES REVIEWED
Pipe Mania (1989, Amiga)
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Portal 2 (2011, PlayStation 3)
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