Adventures of Lolo is a 1989 puzzle game for the NES developed by HAL Laboratory and published by HAL America. The goal of the game is to guide Lolo through 50 levels in order to save his girlfriend Lala from the evil King Egger.
Before you get to the title screen you actually get to see a very simplistic ‘cutscene’ of Princess Lala being kidnapped by King Egger and fliying off to the castle in the distance. The title screen itself doesn’t actually look that good, while I’m ok with part of a logo like the characters name being bigger the difference between the two here just seems far too much.
Other than Start and Password there are no options so you get into the game rather quickly. I found it quite odd that Lolo is seen entering the castle after you choose start despite how far away it seemed in the opening.
When you get into the game the graphics are alright but the music does seem very repetitive. As for controls though they are super simple and you could probably figure out what to do even without reading the manual. The idea being to collect the hearts which sometimes give you ammo that lets you put enemies in bubbles to push out the way or use a second bubble to temporarily kill them. Collecting all the hearts opens the chest with a pearl in which kills all enemies and opens the exit when collected.
Of course its much more complicated than it sounds, not only do you have to use the bubble power sparingly but the game is quick to introduce different kinds of enemies. For example the 2nd level introduces enemies that will wake up and shoot fireballs in front of them once you’ve collected all the hearts while the third level introduces an enemy that walks around and will fall asleep if it bumps into you. Said enemy is easily the most annoying as the worst case scenario is having to press select which is pretty much a suicide button.
Every 5 levels counts as a different floor and to my surprise it already gets to a point of being challenging (to me at least) before you even get to the 10th level out of 50, not only are harder enemies introduced but you end up with multiple after you at once. On top of that you are also given powers which is actually just a way to foce you to collect the hearts in a certain order. Basically to activate the weapon you have to get enough hearts for it which is usually all of them except the one(s) you need the power for. I found it quite an interesting idea and I could tell it would get insane later considering you had 3 power slots.
It was really satisfying once you managed to beat a level especially when an enemy is chasing you down and you only just get to the pearl that kills them. Too bad I didn’t get as far as I wanted though since the later levels seemed like they’d need insane amounts of strategy but I enjoyed what I played (before losing over and over), you seemingly had infinite continues so I never got frustrated at it like I would with some other games.
Overall its quite a nice puzzle game and if you like these sorts of games I highly recommend giving it a try.
0% Imagination 