It's all beautiful for us, but clearly unihabitable for the lemmings.Īdding to the lush atmosphere is an ethereal soundtrack that is sometimes haunting, other times energetic. We don't ever see the lemmings' original or destination worlds, but only the surrealist's nightmares that come between: mysteriously abandoned archaeological digs, topsy-turvy art deco structures, fractally arrayed giant ice shards, decaying dinosaurs, and even stages set in the belly of Hell itself. We're aren't told why the lemmings are being dumped from one green pasture and have to traverse a frangible purgatory to reach the next. But defeat breeds determination, and watching it all come together when you get it right can be exhilirating. Considering that the buggers never stop moving, and the timer never stops ticking, making one wrong move could bring your carefully thought-out plans to a crashing halt.
The timing required necessitates a tight "rhythm" for switching between the skills and plunking them down on the right lemmings at the right instant. Some of the most difficult stages require you to multitask individual lemmings in different parts of the playing field. Getting the mop-topped protagonists past everything the game throws at you is like being an artist with a very limited number of paint colors, brushes, and time to create the Mona Lisa. Instead, you manipulate your intrepid nomads across countless convoluted worlds, many of which you'll start off swearing are impossible. Unlike many games that share the puzzle genre, you're not confined to one screen that barely ever changes. The sheer variety of stages and combinations of skills available bestow a compelling, addictive nature to Lemmings. It's not unusual for a tough level to be followed by an easier one.) While the first few levels are mere training courses that are practically impossible to lose on, they become progressively more difficult the farther you advance (though not necessarily on a steady slope.
Sometimes you are given an abundant surplus and other times only exactly what you need to survive.
The types of skills and the available amount of each change with every stage. The skillset includes builders that construct staircases, climbers that scurry up vertical surfaces, floaters that can fall any distance with the aid of a parasol, blockers that turn other lemmings around upon collision, bombers who explode and take part of the scenery out with them, and diggers, miners, and bashers, all of which can cut paths through background objects (except metal). (What they do after they get there is anyone's guess.) As the unseen player, you must assign the little simpletons appropriate skills to help them cross these obstacles and reach their destination. They will walk directly into traps and pits, or simply die a gurgling unpleasant death from falling too far. In the Lemmings video game, the eponymous creatures (who look more like green-haired elves than any known rodent), are dropped feet-first into twisted, nightmarish terrains where they proceed to march mindlessly forward and never stop unless they bump into something, at which point they turn around and continue plodding along. Although this myth has been proven false, the legend has endured throughout the years, notoriously perpetuated by staged footage in the 1958 Disney documentary, White Wilderness, and various other pop culture references. Lemmings & Oh No! More Lemmings is based on the misconception regarding small rodents that (allegedly) commit suicide en masse by jumping off cliffs and/or swimming into the ocean.
It takes a lot of brains to play it to completion, and took a lot of brains to create it, despite being centered around the very idea of brainlessness. Lemmings is a game so creative, so deep, and elaborate that I wondered how its creators came up with its puzzles almost as much as I contemplated the puzzles' solutions. It's a rare situation when a game catches me offguard, surprises me with its inventiveness, and leaves me pondering the seemingly limitless potential of the medium.