Lemmings
Saving a horde of suicidally minded little creatures who, without your orders, cheerfully march straight into the abyss - Lemmings is proof that the best puzzle games arise from a simple yet irresistible idea. And on the PC Engine console, this classic found itself another home.
The game's premise is perfectly clear. A group of lemmings appears at the start and automatically begins walking forward regardless of danger. You assign them roles - diggers, stair builders, blockers, floaters, or those who sacrifice themselves in an explosion - and thereby carve out a safe path to the exit for the whole group. Each level is essentially a puzzle with limited resources, where you must precisely think through who gets which ability and at what moment. Gradually traps, time pressure and the intricacy of the solutions all pile up.
Lemmings is the work of the Scottish studio DMA Design, from whose ranks the creators of the Grand Theft Auto series later emerged, and it was published by Psygnosis in 1991. After enormous success on the Amiga came a wave of conversions to countless platforms. The PC Engine, a console popular especially in Japan and born from the collaboration between NEC and Hudson Soft, was one of them.
Culturally, Lemmings proved that a puzzle game could be a mass hit while still having its own distinctive humor. The helpless yet adorable lemmings etched themselves into memory, and their name became a metaphor for blindly following the crowd. To this day the game is considered one of the most influential titles of its genre.
The PC Engine version benefited from the console's ability to display colorful, legible graphics and to comfortably handle a multitude of tiny characters on screen. For players on that platform it was a pleasant way to savor one of the finest puzzle games of its time. The series then continued with many installments and remakes, but the original magic remains unsurpassed.
Why play it: For timeless, cleverly layered puzzles in which rescuing the last lemming brings true satisfaction.
Game 33 of 38 for PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16
The same title elsewhere (8)
The Amiga is Lemmings' home platform and offers the reference version, with the full level count and smoothest mouse control. The DOS PC version stays very close, keeping mouse control equally precise, with EGA or VGA graphics only slightly adjusted. On the Commodore 64, developers had to split the game across multiple disks due to limited memory and reduce scrolling smoothness, yet preserved most levels. Portable versions for Game Boy and SEGA Game Gear suffer from small screen resolution — in hectic scenes with a hundred lemmings on screen it's hard to keep track, and D-pad control never quite matches mouse precision. On SEGA Mega Drive and Super Nintendo you play with a gamepad cursor, slower than a mouse, but both are colorful and include most original puzzles.
