The Lost Vikings can be a lot of fun and will definitely show you how Blizzard became known for their world building and strategy games. I played the game on the SNES but if you can hunt it down the Sega Genesis version has five more levels. There are tons of levels to play through and the passwords are simple enough that you can remember them and get back to where you were. It’s like a streamlined version of Lemmings if Lemmings took elements from Ghouls and Ghosts. The Lost Vikings has a lot of personality but it feels pretty dated. This settles in its own comfort zone where you’re not doing too much of either. Racking your brain is one thing and hacking and slashing is another. The puzzles are more challenging to execute than to figure out which is somehow rewarding. For the limitations presented by that era it certainly set itself apart. The Lost Vikings makes up for its frustration with a lot of ambition. Basically, if you mess up even a little you have to start all over and it takes a lot of deep breaths to move forward. This didn’t work the first few tries and I eventually figured it out by chance.
You can get to the top of the tree and simply move forward to land across the quicksand…theoretically. Eventually, I figured out the climbing thing. I didn’t know this, however, so I spent a few long-winded attempts by using Erik the jumping Norwegian to try and find the item or bridge to unlock. During the pyramid levels you can climb trees to get across quicksand.
It’s extra frustrating because for some reason the level doesn’t end when one of your vikings dies, but if you reach the end of the level with one or two of them left you end up at the continue screen anyway. There’s no way to look through the entirety of the level so each section went something like this: Move Olaf the shield guy forward, move everyone else a little bit, kill the enemies, run into a section you can’t see past, die, realize how you were supposed to do it, start over and try again.
The game requires a lot of trial and error to figure out the puzzles and even the platforming works that way in the later levels. I don’t remember how well I did renting this as a kid, but I’m guessing I didn’t get anywhere near as far as I did this play through. It’s a silly comparison considering that game was basically Tapper if you had two bartenders. The only other game I can compare it to is the Mario Bros pie game in Game & Watch Gallery 3 for Game Boy Color. It has a dynamic I’m surprised wasn’t used much in games to follow. The Lost Vikings requires a level of patience beyond what you’d expect from a 16-bit era platformer. Each level is basically just different colored platforms but you’ll climb trees, ladders, and even inflate your vikings to get past some of the sections. You’ll fight cavemen, dinosaurs, pharaohs, scorpions, and more through caves, pyramids, volcanoes, spaceships, and other odd places for Norsemen. The level design has a bit of variety to it. The aliens, or “Croutonians,” do a terrible job keeping the vikings in their ship and you warp around from world to world trying to get home. One day all three of the vikings were out hunting and then aliens came along and captured them to put them on their species display. The story has a level of depth literature fanatics will go bananas over.
You can switch between each viking with the L and R buttons, and in order to finish the level you need to get all three vikings to the exit. Each section of the levels requires you to use each viking’s ability to get you from point A to point B. Baleog can attack each enemy with a sword and bow, Olaf has a shield to defend from attacks and slow your fall, and Erik the swift can run fast, jump, and smash certain walls with his head. You play as all three vikings each with a unique ability. The game is described as a puzzle/platformer title but that doesn’t quite describe the gameplay. The Lost Vikings was the one of the first original titles developed by Blizzard, then called Silicon & Synapse. For newer Blizzard fans, these characters may be unknown, but for those of growing up in the 16-bit era these characters are collectively known as The Lost Vikings. Their names are Baleog, Olaf, and Erik the Swift. Last November at Blizzcon it was announced there would be a new unit for the upcoming Heroes of the Storm MOBA. The Lost Vikings is a welcome trip through Blizzard’s time capsule. Three Vikings Walk Into a Spaceship… Praise Odin for nostalgia.