Nintendo’s 1989 NES puzzler Adventures of Lolo asks players to guide a round creature named Lolo through the castle of King Egger to rescue Princess Lala. HAL Laboratory developed and published it. It is a compilation of puzzles drawn from two earlier Japanese Eggerland games, and it became the first entry in that series to reach North America. The premise is thin. The rooms are not. Adventures of Lolo strips the action game down to a single question — can you clear this screen — and then asks it fifty times.
Fifty Rooms, Ten Floors, One Round Hero
The structure is exact. King Egger has taken Lala, and Lolo must climb the castle to get her back. The castle holds 50 rooms arranged in 10 floors of five. Each room requires Lolo to collect hearts, which open a treasure chest, which yields a gem. The gem opens the path to the next room. Clear four rooms and a stairway leads upward.
That loop never changes. What changes is the maze around it.
Hearts, Chests, and the Gem That Ends the Room
Every room is a small closed system. Lolo moves, slides certain blocks, and fires a limited number of shots. Enemies vary by movement and attack pattern, and they include Skull, Medusa and Rocky. Some enemies cannot be hit by Lolo’s shots at all. When a shot does land, the enemy is encased in an egg for a short time. That egg can be pushed to a new spot, used as a bridge across water, or shot again to make the enemy vanish for a while. Pick up the gem and every enemy in the room disappears.
One life is lost whenever Lolo is shot or touched by certain enemies. Others will not kill him but will impede his movement by standing still or freezing in place on contact. The player can restart a screen at any time, at the cost of one life. That last rule is the whole design in miniature: the game hands you a reset button and charges you for using it.
The Order of the Castle
The difficulty curve is not a curve. It is a staircase, and it is worth laying out what the climb actually asks of you:
- Read the room — identify the hearts, the chest, the gem and the exit before touching anything.
- Map the enemies — which ones move, which ones freeze, which ones your shots cannot touch.
- Spend your shots — the count is limited, and a wasted egg is a room you cannot finish.
- Use the eggs — push them, bridge water with them, or shoot them again to clear a lane.
- Take the gem — the moment you hold it, every enemy on the screen is gone.
- Climb — four rooms cleared opens the stairway to the next floor.
That order matters because the game punishes nothing so much as impatience. Most failures in Adventures of Lolo are not reflexes failing. They are a plan failing.
A Running Order for the First Sitting
For anyone starting fresh, the early floors are short and the later ones are not. A reasonable first session looks like this:
| Session block | Floors | Rooms | What it teaches |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opening run | 1–2 | 10 | Heart, chest and gem order |
| First wall | 3–4 | 10 | Shot economy and egg placement |
| Midpoint | 5–6 | 10 | Enemies your shots cannot touch |
| The grind | 7–8 | 10 | Block sliding under pressure |
| Endgame | 9–10 | 10 | Everything at once |
The table is not a promise that the game paces itself evenly. It does not. Floors 7 through 10 stack mechanics that earlier floors introduced one at a time, and the cost of a restart starts to bite.
Where Lolo Gets Its Power
The special abilities are the best idea in the game. On specific screens Lolo can gain powers beyond his standard shot — the ability to smash rocks, or to build a bridge. These are not permanent upgrades. They belong to the room that grants them, which means the game can hand you a new verb and take it back before you lean on it.
That restraint is why Adventures of Lolo holds up. It is not a game about getting stronger. It is a game about solving the specific problem in front of you with the specific tools the room allows.
What the Sequels Did With It
Adventures of Lolo received two direct sequels. The Japanese Adventures of Lolo consists entirely of new stages. The American Adventures of Lolo 2 is another collection of stages from earlier Japanese games. Then in 1994 a game titled Adventures of Lolo arrived for Game Boy in Europe and Japan — not the same game as the NES version at all, but the tenth installment in the series, with continued additions to the base gameplay. The naming is a mess. The lineage is not.
The NES original has also stayed reachable. It was available on the Wii’s and Wii U’s Virtual Console in North America and in PAL regions, and on the Nintendo Switch’s Nintendo Classics service.
The Verdict on Adventures of Lolo
Adventures of Lolo earns a 7.5/10. That is a fair score for a game whose ceiling is set by its own discipline. The puzzle design is tight, the rules are legible, and the egg mechanic does more work than most NES games get out of an entire inventory. The 50 rooms are varied enough that the loop does not wear out, and the enemy roster — Skull, Medusa, Rocky and the rest — forces genuine rethinking rather than reflex.
What holds it back is everything around the puzzles. Lolo has no story worth the name. Lala is a hostage and nothing more. King Egger is a name on a castle. The game offers no reason to climb beyond the next door, and after ten floors the absence of any narrative payoff is felt. The one-life-per-restart rule also turns the late floors into a tax on patience rather than a test of skill.
None of that undoes the core. Adventures of Lolo is one of the cleanest pure puzzle games on the NES, and it earns its place in the Eggerland line by refusing to add anything the rooms do not need. 7.5 of 10.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
