Retro spotlight: Adventures of Lolo
Before there was Kirby and Lololo, there was simply Lolo.
This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
HAL Laboratory is best-known for 30 years of making Kirby games, but their first franchise full of sequels not only predates the pink puffball by a few years, but came early enough on in the company’s history that it didn’t even release on Nintendo’s platforms at first. What would eventually be known internationally as the Adventures of Lolo series is actually Eggerland, the first of which was 1985’s Eggerland Mystery for the MSX, a joint venture computer between Microsoft and ASCII Corporation that found most of its success in Japan, but also made its way to parts of Europe, as well.
Its sequel, Eggerland 2, released on the MSX, MSX2, and Nintendo’s Famicom Disk System, with subsequent releases for the franchise also releasing on the various iterations of the Famicom and western Nintendo Entertainment System. Eggerland would eventually return to computers after the end of the Famicom/NES life cycle, with a pair of games for Windows, but other than that and a Game Boy release, the NES and Famicom were where Eggerland lived from the second game on.
What North America knows as NES title Adventures of Lolo is actually something of a compilation game from previous Eggerland efforts. It wasn’t released in Japan on the Famicom at all, since nothing within was new: it was really just a way to catch North America up on something they had not yet experienced, five years after the series debuted in Japan. Strategy Wiki actually has a page dedicated specifically to showing you which game each puzzle room first appeared in: 70 percent of Adventures of Lolo came from Eggerland: Departure to Creation, while the rest — save one original stage, the last one in Adventures of Lolo — first appeared in the initial two Eggerland titles that received MSX releases.
This process actually makes Adventures of Lolo a standout experience, since it curated some of the best and toughest stages the series had produced to that point, and the result is a puzzle game that will certainly challenge you. It’s never unfair: it just requires that you understand how the rules of its world work, and stop to think about just what needs to be done. You have limited lives, and there is a button specifically for killing the titular Lolo to try again if you’ve accidentally backed yourself into a literal or figurative corner, but the game also features a password system (just four letters per password, too) that lets you re-access every single one of the game’s 50 rooms, so you actually have as many chances as your patience allows.
Here are the basic things you will do in Adventures of Lolo: push blocks, turn enemies into orbs, push those orbs to block enemy fire, create pathways, or to use as a bridge or raft over water. There are certain enemies that will not awake until you move, others that will not react until you have collected all of the hearts that are there to be collected and become very dangerous impediments to you actually leaving the room in the process, and those that will only react when you are within their field of vision, in which case you will automatically die. You need to push those blocks to keep enemies trapped, or to keep them from being able to auto-kill you, or to open up your path, or sometimes all three with the same block depending on what part of the puzzle you’re in.
The puzzles seem simple enough at first, but complexity builds and builds until you realize that the most difficult thing about Lolo is figuring out the exact order that you should be doing things in. Do you begin by pushing this block down and to the left for X, or does that make it so you won’t be able to access it later on when it’s actually needed for Y? What are you going to do about that enemy that chases you and falls asleep the second it touches you? Oh, maybe you can lure it over to where it will act as a block that will keep a foe who will wake up later from escaping its corner and chasing you, or maybe you just need to make sure that your napping opponent isn’t going to catch you and fall asleep where it will act as an impediment to your own progress.
You sometimes receive a limited number of attacks, which are used to freeze enemies into orbs, and as said, those orbs can then be pushed around. You need to act fast, because enemies will break free from the orbs, or eventually respawn if you go through the trouble of clearing them away entirely by hitting them with a second attack while they’re in orb form. Sometimes all you need to do is shove a little harmless but in-your-way snake out of the way while in orb form. Sometimes you need to push that thing in front of a Medusa statue that will auto-kill Lolo should it see him, and sometimes you need to shove that snake orb into a waterway so you can float downstream on it to reach one of the hearts you need to unlock the treasure chest that contains the key for the room’s door.
In addition to the attacks, you’ll occasionally be able to place a bridge or two within a stage, or change the direction for certain arrow tiles, which are designed so that you can walk over them from any direction except for the opposite of which way the arrow is pointing. So, a left-pointing arrow can be accessed from the top, bottom, or left of it, but not from the right: and yes, this design is used to funnel you around or make stages with very obvious destinations more circuitous than they would be if not for the block’s placement. You can sit and look at what the room might need you to do before moving, or you can just start experimenting and using up your lives and restarting as necessary. Again, since you have unlimited chances via the password system, you can do whichever works better for your brain.
These couple of videos make things look easy…
…but that’s just because the person playing has internalized all the lessons the game taught to that point, and made them aware of how the various little gimmicks and foes work. You, too, can play through Adventures of Lolo with ease, once you’ve failed it enough times to get to that point.
Lolo is ascending a 10-floor tower in order to save his girlfriend, Lala, and yes, Lololo and Lalala from Kirby’s Dream Land look just like these two, which isn’t an accident. Don’t worry, even if they’re the same characters pushing the same green blocks around, they aren’t really villains, are they, not since they served King Dedede in that game, and Dedede turned out to be not so bad after all, not unless he gets possessed by some higher power or visiting alien, yeah? And even if you do consider Lolo(lo) and Lala(la) to be villains, well, villain origin stories are very in right now, so whatever.
Anyway, each of the 10 floors has five puzzle rooms within it, and the game gets progressively more difficult and complex as you ascend the tower. By the time you settle in and think you’ve got the challenges down, new ones are introduced, and at all times, you need to be sure you’re not rushing around. Pushing a block literally half-a-tile too far in one direction or another can be enough to screw up the entire room and force you to restart. That might sound tedious, but it’s not: you just realize you need to be very careful and deliberate with your movements. So long as you play that way, you’ll find you’re putting the blocks where you need them to be once you know where that even is.
There is a simplicity to the actions you can take in the game that make it very approachable now just as it was three-plus decades ago, but the complexity found the deeper you go within the game makes it worth playing all this time later, too. It will test you: initial reviews from 1990 said as much, and so did the critics from its re-release on the Virtual Console in 2007, and this 2022 review is going to echo all of that. It’s not impossible by any means, but you’re not going to just waltz through it without taking the time to learn how its systems and internal logic work. And once you do figure those things out, you’re going to feel very satisfied with yourself for completing the game’s challenges.
It’s a bit odd, given how well the gameplay has held up, that Nintendo and HAL haven’t done a better job of keeping Lolo/Eggerland active and relevant. All three Adventures of Lolo games on the NES made their way to the Wii Virtual Console, but only the first one released on the Wii U and 3DS versions of the service, and that’s also the lone Lolo title available on the NES portion of Nintendo Switch Online at the moment, as well. HAL never bothered with either an Eggerland or Lolo release for the SNES, and has made no attempt at reviving the franchise on Nintendo consoles since, either. They haven’t given up on puzzles, by any means — BoxBoy is a tremendous modern effort, for instance, that will tax you in the same kind of order-of-operations way as Lolo — but still, it’s beyond time for a new Lolo. Or, at least, for the old ones to be reintroduced to the world again for the first time since the Wii Shop became a digital museum where you can merely look at the exhibits from afar.
Re-release the originals in a collection, remaster them for the modern era, or make an entirely new Lolo adventure that shows us all what HAL has learned about game development and puzzles since the early 90s. Do all three! Just do something with games that deserve better, as they’ve held up in a highly enjoyable way for three decades now. In the meantime, at least you can access the original if you’ve got a Wii U, 3DS, or Switch. And you should, as it’ll be an enjoyable, albeit taxing, afternoon of pushing blocks around and avoiding instadeath for you if you do.
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