Eggerland Mystery (MSX Review) The First Game in the Adventures of Lolo Franchise

Eggerland Mystery
Platform: MSX
Released in 1985
Developed by HAL Laboratory, Inc.
NO MODERN RELEASE

Yeah, the puzzle design in this one can be quite weird.

Eggerland Mystery is the very first game in the franchise that would come to be known as The Adventures of Lolo outside of Japan. America only got three of those games, but there’s a LOT more Lolo releases that Americans never got. That obviously includes the first two games since MSX never got a US release, but there’s also Famicom-exclusives and even a Game Boy version of Lolo. So it’s a pretty big series, actually, and before Eggerland Mystery, I’d only played one of them all the way through: the original US version of Adventures of Lolo. It was actually the first NES game I reviewed for IGC all the way back in my first year (I also started playing Lolo 2 but I’m pretty sure I never finished it). Eggerland/Lolo is one of those confusing franchises where the version America got is completely different from the Japanese original. NES Lolo 2 in the West is Lolo 1 in the East, and the puzzles in Japanese Lolo 1 are different from those in American Lolo 2. On the left is level 1-1 of The Adventures of Lolo 2 in the US, and on the right is Adventures of Lolo 1 in Japan’s level 1-1.

Adventures of Lolo 2 (US)

Adventures of Lolo (JPN)

So that’s awesomely annoying. I’ll do my best to walk everyone through this when I get to later games in the series. The first US NES Adventures of Lolo is on Switch Online right now, and it’s worth a look. They’re a series of logic-puzzlers with a slight action tilt to them, but the focus is mostly on flexing your gray matter. Well, at least that’s where the series will eventually end up. It became kind of obvious with this first release that HAL wanted to make something a little more arcade-like and hadn’t realized their bread and butter would be in tight, one-solution style puzzles. Eggerland Mystery comes close at times to being equal parts action and puzzle, and the result is a game with an identity crisis. Luckily, that crisis would be resolved in the next game in the franchise. I’ll get to the sequel soon, but today, let’s look at the first game.

One original aspect of this that wasn’t used in future games: sometimes (very, very rarely) the final door is hidden and must be found.

With a whopping 100 puzzle rooms (plus 20 bonus round rooms) and 5 post-game stages that require a special password to unlock, Eggerland Mystery is a pretty dang big game. If you played any of the NES or Famicom versions of Lolo, you mostly know what to expect. Instead of collecting hearts, you collect diamonds. There’s no treasure chest to reach, either. That’s replaced with a door that opens after you’ve collected every diamond. The object is simply to collect all the diamonds and then walk through the door. There’s a handful of enemies, some of which are harmless, while others, like medusa, prevent you from crossing their path unless you place a block in their line of sight.

The arrows seen in this screen can be walked through from the side, but never in the opposite way they’re pointed. Also, you don’t know which diamonds give you shots until you get them, but they always give you two shots when they do.

The medusas can’t be killed (except in the bonus stages, which are stupid), but with other enemies, some of the diamonds provide you with shots that temporarily turn them into eggs. Once they’re eggs, another shot blows them off the screen (they will respawn soon) OR you can push them, using them functionally as blocks to help solve the puzzles. They can even be pushed in the water and used as rafts. Finally, some levels might also provide you with special tools like bridges to cross water or the ability to change the direction of a one-way arrow. So far, so Lolo. But, this for sure isn’t the NES Lolo in many, many ways.

Between bonus stages, you’re provided with a password if you need to quit, but you’re also provided with one single character for the ultimate password that takes you to the final five stages of the game. Beating those five stages doesn’t get you a better ending or anything like that (hell, there’s no ending at all) but the toughest level in the game was among those five puzzles, so that’s something. Here is that password, with the heart being the final thing you enter.

For starters, your movement is quite janky. I’d describe the animation in this game as “choppy” which causes the controls to sometimes seem laggy or unresponsive. You’ll especially feel it when you have to ride eggs that you’ve pushed in the water or dodge the armadillo-like enemies that roll at you, who are by far the hardest aspect of the game. It’s certainly not the puzzles themselves. It’s clear that the designers didn’t fully grasp the concept of tight puzzle design at this point, because I was able to finish tons of levels with leftover shots. I was also often able to circumvent the “puzzle logic” by ignoring threats, specifically the skulls. In future Eggerland/Lolo games, the skulls will move faster and provide a legitimate threat that needs to be addressed before grabbing the final diamond/heart in the room, which wakes them up. In Eggerland Mystery, you move faster than them, and sometimes you can even grab the final diamond when it’s directly next to a skull and, as long as you start moving right away, avoid being killed by it when it wakes up. I did this in multiple rooms.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s levels where you’re meant to leg-it past the skulls, like in this stage. In other stages, you’re meant to “tempt them” to chase you in one direction and then you simply run around to the other side once they’re committed to the path they’re on. You’re much faster than them, so as long as you don’t panic, you’ll win every foot race. It helps the skulls aren’t very smart and don’t necessarily heat-seek you. In future games, you mostly can’t ignore them.

The dragons have a similar problem. Although they’re much harder to cheese, sometimes you can trick them by taking a half-step forward and letting them fire at you, then back up and run past them once their fire passes you. This requires a lot of room though, and now I’m curious if this is possible to do in future Lolo games. Either way, a lot of the puzzles have “multiple outs” and, for games like this, I prefer a much tighter design. Fans of the NES games will also notice that many enemies and elements common to Lolo hadn’t been invented yet with this game. The “leapers” that fall asleep when you touch them? They’re not here, nor are the walking versions of the medusas that throw swords at you, the rock monsters that push you around, sand traps, or any stages involving lava or collapsing bridges. In 105 levels, I only got stuck one time, and that’s when I realized that the game had introduced the teleporting snakes idea where you must kill one of the harmless snakes, then push a block over where it was, and it’ll respawn somewhere else.

In this gallery, you can see me start with a snake above the river, but after it sinks in the lake, because I covered the space it started, it reappears south of the river. By the way, the currents aren’t visible, so you won’t know how a raft behaves until you try it.

It took me nearly an hour to figure that out. Mind you, you’re two-thirds of the way through the game before this is even needed, with no education that this is even going to be a thing that you need to do. It’s pretty obvious that HAL had no idea what they were doing and were flying by the seam of their pants with Eggerland Mystery, but the franchise would drastically improve from here. For the first game, they didn’t quite grasp that they were a home puzzle game and not a coin-op. You’ll notice there’s a score in the corner, though that’s related to collecting diamonds and how many enemies you kill. There’s no penalty for taking too many steps like some Sokoban games (aka Boxxle) might do, nor is there a bonus for saving shots. At least I don’t think there’s a bonus, but there are bonus stages which were quite lame and a constant reminder of how janky the game’s “combat” mechanics are. The shooting is not very well programmed, as not every shot that’s a direct hit actually works to turn an enemy into an egg. I had a TON of moments where a shot landed and nothing happened. It’s all but a guarantee it’ll happen to you multiple times in some of the later bonus stages and even during a few of the puzzles.

In the bonus stages, you can’t die and enemies that normally shoot you, like the medusa, no longer do. You have 20 seconds to blow away every enemy on the screen for bonus points. This was a huge waste of time.

If you play in the B Mode of the game, you play the same 100 levels, only this time you have a time limit and each stage has bonus point items. While that sounds enticing, the items are seemingly hidden in arbitrary spots, and possibly randomly generated. There’s no “puzzle” element to the scoring system. I stuck to the A mode and was more than happy. For all its jank, the formula created by Eggerland lasted through over ten games for a reason. I’m just getting restarted with Lolo after playing the first game in the franchise back in 2012. Over the next year or two, I intend to review all the other console and MSX games in the series. When I do, the thing I’m hoping to see improved the most isn’t actually the play control, but the difficulty scaling. There were so many times late in the game where I found myself saying “that should have been a very early puzzle.” So there’s a LOT of room for improvement, but the good news is, the franchise will keep getting better. In fact, it gets so good that it makes Eggerland Mystery feel like an unfinished proof of concept.

I’m pretty sure this is the only game in the Lolo franchise where one of the special power items allows you to generate a new block any place you want and then push around. In future games, this would be replaced with a hammer that allows you to shatter a single rock anywhere you want. Sadly, the “magic framer” item only appears a couple of times in the entire 100+ level game.

The reason this isn’t the first game in a Definitive Review is because I’m taking my time with these games. I think I would have gotten bored if I played through Eggerland Mystery’s 100+ puzzles (and the unbearable bonus levels) in a single sitting. Instead, I paced myself over the course of a week and took frequent breaks. Games like this are ideal for that, and Lolo specifically excels when you hit-up a handful of levels at a time. That’s why I really think Nintendo and HAL need to figure things out and put out a collection. It’s just such a perfect franchise for a portable platform like Nintendo Switch. Well, I do sort of question how portable the humongous Switch 2 really is. I don’t take it places like I did the original, BUT MY POINT STANDS!

If you’re saying “hey wait, didn’t I see that thing in Kirby?” Yes. Yes, you did. Lolo and Princess Lala (pronounced Low-Low and Lah-Lah) are actually recurring villains in the Kirby franchise, only they’re now called “Lololo & Lalala.” No clue why. If HAL wanted to resurrect the gameplay style of the franchise, I have no objection to dropping Lolo in favor of Kirby. The gameplay is what’s timeless and Lolo’s character design is as generic as it gets, and I say that as a woman who uses a generic round, yellow character as a mascot. Along with StarTropics, this seems like the biggest HAL/Nintendo franchise to get NO reference at all in Smash Bros. I absolutely do not understand how this series, so beloved across the world and a game that sold enough to get TEN games has no clout in the 21st century.

I’m going to guess that when I finish the series, I’m going to ultimately name Eggerland Mystery the worst in the franchise. It’s clunky, often forgets what kind of game it is, and the level design isn’t particularly strong. It’s not necessarily weak, either, but it’s so loose compared to the US versions of Lolo that I can’t even guarantee Lolo fans will like Eggerland Mystery. The movement is too sluggish and the puzzles aren’t as tight or clever as the series would get, to the point that I think Lolo fans are likely to be at least a little disappointed. But if you want to see where one of gaming’s most underrated franchises got its start, I still think it’s worth a look. Just lower your expectations if you’re familiar with the series, because this thing is SLOPPY. But it’s fun too, and another reason why gaming fans owe the MSX more than they realize.
Verdict: YES!