Game Review: Adventures of Lolo
2017-Jun-29, Thursday 22:30![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
For a game that seems mostly forgotten and whose legacy only survives through cameos in the Kirby games, I got a big response to Adventures of Lolo when I posted a screenshot of a level on Facebook. I never played it as a child, but I looked at the images in Nintendo Power published as part of the Counselor's Corner and thought it sounded like a lot of fun. And like so many other games I saw in Nintendo Power, I stuck it in the back of my mind, carried it through the years, and waited until I got a chance to play it. It's worth it.
I'd never heard of Sokoban until I started watching Jeremy Parish's Game Boy World, which chronicles the sheer number of Sokoban clones on the Game Boy's first year of life. They all follow the same basic premise involving pushing boxes into various configurations in order to win. Most of those are pretty forgettable, but Adventures of Lolo is much more involved than a lot of similar games through the inclusion of enemies.
Each of the fifty rooms has a series of the required pushable boxes, but rather than being some kind of featureless storage facility, like Sisyphus sent to warehouse hell, the rooms here are full of trees, rocks, water, grass, bridges, and monsters. Trees block movement but not sightlines, allowing monsters to attack Lolo through them. Moving monsters won't walk onto grass but Lolo can. Lolo must avoid the monsters, navigate the hazards, and collect all the hearts in each level, opening the treasure box and revealing the pearl that, when grabbed, will kill all the enemies and unlock the door to the next level.
It's not particularly complicated, except maybe in comparison to pure Sokoban. Levels generally focus on either dealing with monsters or dealing with box puzzles, with much more thinking required than twitch reflexes. In that respect, Adventures of Lolo is much more of a puzzle game than the usual standard examples like Tetris. Every level opens paused, allowing you to look at the geometry, figure out where to go, and develop a plan. And while you have to execute it in real time, only rarely does this rely on finger speed rather than brain speed.
You'll never catch me!
Early levels are easy, introducing Lolo and his enternal friend the pushable box, as well as the powerups from hearts. The most common powerup is the egg shot, allowing Lolo to turn a monster into an egg and push them around like a block. Shooting an enemy a second time will get rid of them entirely, but this is usually inadvisable since enemies respawn in their original locations after a short time--if pushed while an egg, they remain in the new location--and there are a limited number of shots. The most dangerous enemies, the medusas and don medusas, can't be hit with egg shots because if Lolo is ever in their line of sight, they instantly kill him. There are also bridge (for crossing water), hammer (for breaking rocks), and panel changer (for altering the direction of one-way panels) power-ups as well, but they aren't used nearly as often as the basic egg shot.
Later levels then tend to be a giant maze of twisty passages and one-way panels, requiring a lot of planning and forethought in order to successfully navigate all the turns without blocking in Lolo, blocking off one of the hearts or, most heartbreakingly, blocking off the exit after all the hearts have been collected. Or as another option, they're much more open, but filled with monsters and blocks, requiring proper placement of blocks to allow Lolo to avoid medusa sight lines and trap skulls, which activate as soon as the last heart is collected, into small areas away from the treasure. Sokoban is one of those games where complexity arises from simple rules, and there's a surprising amount of variety that Adventures of Lolo derives from its simple premise and tools.
Sailing away.
I do have some quibbles, but one of them I think is just down to being an NES conversion. For some reason, Lolo has lives and restarting a puzzle uses one of them up. These are basically meaningless, since when they are all lost you can just continue from the main menu and immediately restart from the same room, but it does provide a psychological incentive to never die and thus to avoid anything risky that might trap Lolo in an unwinnable situation. And this was especially annoying when mixed in with two unpredictable situations: enemy movement and water currents.
Some levels require pushing an egg onto the water, where it floats in a pre-defined pattern until it reaches a stopping point, after which it sinks. But there's no visual indicator of what the currents are and each level has a limited amount of egg shots, so the only way to solve them is either to hop on and use your lightning reflexes to react to everything the moment that it happens, which breaks the thoughtful pace of the game, or to waste a life figuring out how the patterns work and then die and do them for real. It seems like there should be some feedback about what the egg is going to do.
Monsters aren't as bad because their movement is supposed to be unpredictable, but there are times when you need to use monsters as part of a puzzle. Leeper chases Lolo and falls asleep forever (
) if it catches him, and sometimes that's necessary to block a medusa's line of sight. This took a few attempts to figure out, but at least it's not common.
There was also a moment where I had two medusas to block and one box and the solution was to push the box halfway across so it blocked both of them, something never previously necessary, but I'm not sure if that's annoying or clever.
Victory dance!
The music isn't that great either--that's singular, there's really only one song--but the cute graphics make up for it. More games should have round blobby things as their main characters. I honestly think that's part of my enjoyment of the game, even beyond the extra complexity added by the monsters and terrain. One of the first games I downloaded for my iPhone back in the early days of the app store was Boxed In, a Sokoban clone about a robot moving boxes around, and I barely played it. In contrast, Mouse House, a Sokoban clone about a mouse moving boxes around, got hours of play from me on the strength of its cartoony graphics, bizarrely-out-of-place techno soundtrack, and the way the mouse sung a cheerful ditty whenever he moved through the door at the end of the level.schoolpsychnerd still sings those few notes whenever I bring up Mouse House.
Adventures of Lolo has some of that charm, and it's still evident all these years later. A good spin on a classic game genre.
I'd never heard of Sokoban until I started watching Jeremy Parish's Game Boy World, which chronicles the sheer number of Sokoban clones on the Game Boy's first year of life. They all follow the same basic premise involving pushing boxes into various configurations in order to win. Most of those are pretty forgettable, but Adventures of Lolo is much more involved than a lot of similar games through the inclusion of enemies.
Each of the fifty rooms has a series of the required pushable boxes, but rather than being some kind of featureless storage facility, like Sisyphus sent to warehouse hell, the rooms here are full of trees, rocks, water, grass, bridges, and monsters. Trees block movement but not sightlines, allowing monsters to attack Lolo through them. Moving monsters won't walk onto grass but Lolo can. Lolo must avoid the monsters, navigate the hazards, and collect all the hearts in each level, opening the treasure box and revealing the pearl that, when grabbed, will kill all the enemies and unlock the door to the next level.
It's not particularly complicated, except maybe in comparison to pure Sokoban. Levels generally focus on either dealing with monsters or dealing with box puzzles, with much more thinking required than twitch reflexes. In that respect, Adventures of Lolo is much more of a puzzle game than the usual standard examples like Tetris. Every level opens paused, allowing you to look at the geometry, figure out where to go, and develop a plan. And while you have to execute it in real time, only rarely does this rely on finger speed rather than brain speed.
Early levels are easy, introducing Lolo and his enternal friend the pushable box, as well as the powerups from hearts. The most common powerup is the egg shot, allowing Lolo to turn a monster into an egg and push them around like a block. Shooting an enemy a second time will get rid of them entirely, but this is usually inadvisable since enemies respawn in their original locations after a short time--if pushed while an egg, they remain in the new location--and there are a limited number of shots. The most dangerous enemies, the medusas and don medusas, can't be hit with egg shots because if Lolo is ever in their line of sight, they instantly kill him. There are also bridge (for crossing water), hammer (for breaking rocks), and panel changer (for altering the direction of one-way panels) power-ups as well, but they aren't used nearly as often as the basic egg shot.
Later levels then tend to be a giant maze of twisty passages and one-way panels, requiring a lot of planning and forethought in order to successfully navigate all the turns without blocking in Lolo, blocking off one of the hearts or, most heartbreakingly, blocking off the exit after all the hearts have been collected. Or as another option, they're much more open, but filled with monsters and blocks, requiring proper placement of blocks to allow Lolo to avoid medusa sight lines and trap skulls, which activate as soon as the last heart is collected, into small areas away from the treasure. Sokoban is one of those games where complexity arises from simple rules, and there's a surprising amount of variety that Adventures of Lolo derives from its simple premise and tools.
I do have some quibbles, but one of them I think is just down to being an NES conversion. For some reason, Lolo has lives and restarting a puzzle uses one of them up. These are basically meaningless, since when they are all lost you can just continue from the main menu and immediately restart from the same room, but it does provide a psychological incentive to never die and thus to avoid anything risky that might trap Lolo in an unwinnable situation. And this was especially annoying when mixed in with two unpredictable situations: enemy movement and water currents.
Some levels require pushing an egg onto the water, where it floats in a pre-defined pattern until it reaches a stopping point, after which it sinks. But there's no visual indicator of what the currents are and each level has a limited amount of egg shots, so the only way to solve them is either to hop on and use your lightning reflexes to react to everything the moment that it happens, which breaks the thoughtful pace of the game, or to waste a life figuring out how the patterns work and then die and do them for real. It seems like there should be some feedback about what the egg is going to do.
Monsters aren't as bad because their movement is supposed to be unpredictable, but there are times when you need to use monsters as part of a puzzle. Leeper chases Lolo and falls asleep forever (
) if it catches him, and sometimes that's necessary to block a medusa's line of sight. This took a few attempts to figure out, but at least it's not common.There was also a moment where I had two medusas to block and one box and the solution was to push the box halfway across so it blocked both of them, something never previously necessary, but I'm not sure if that's annoying or clever.
The music isn't that great either--that's singular, there's really only one song--but the cute graphics make up for it. More games should have round blobby things as their main characters. I honestly think that's part of my enjoyment of the game, even beyond the extra complexity added by the monsters and terrain. One of the first games I downloaded for my iPhone back in the early days of the app store was Boxed In, a Sokoban clone about a robot moving boxes around, and I barely played it. In contrast, Mouse House, a Sokoban clone about a mouse moving boxes around, got hours of play from me on the strength of its cartoony graphics, bizarrely-out-of-place techno soundtrack, and the way the mouse sung a cheerful ditty whenever he moved through the door at the end of the level.
schoolpsychnerd still sings those few notes whenever I bring up Mouse House. Adventures of Lolo has some of that charm, and it's still evident all these years later. A good spin on a classic game genre.
