Lemmings (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
263A playthrough of Sunsoft's 1992 puzzle game for the Super Nintendo, Lemmings.
This video shows all of the game's puzzles. Here are some timestamps:
Fun 1:29
Tricky 1:14:35
Taxing 2:54:19
Mayhem 4:52:18
Sunsoft 7:13:26
Ending 7:31:22
Long before they set the industry on fire with Grand Theft Auto, developer DMA Designs became a star on gaming's world stage with the release of the Psygnosis-published 1991 Amiga game Lemmings.
As you may know, lemmings are real animals. They're related to muskrats and voles, resembling a mix of mouse and guinea pig. And, contrary to popular belief, they are not prone to committing acts of mass suicide. That myth was largely perpetuated by a 1950s-era Disney documentary. In a disgusting bid to sensationalize the project, the filmmakers actually threw the poor animals off of a cliff in order to capture video "evidence" of this supposedly natural behavior. Someone should have tossed the Disney crew from that cliff instead. Heartless bastards.
The lemmings in Lemmings are based off of this myth. They're mindless drones that walk forever forward, no matter what hazards lie in their way. The goal of every stage, then, is to safely guide the lemmings to a portal through which they may escape before the timer runs out.
To save them from themselves, you can assign individual lemmings tasks in order to create a safe path. They can tunnel through earth, build bridges, climb obstacles - all sorts of different things, represented by the icons lining the bottom of the screen. Since each stage provides you a limited number of uses for these roles, the stages are exercises in resource management and lateral thinking. If everyone is headed toward a lake or a flamethrower, it's up to you to figure out how to steer them around. That is, of course, unless you want a giant pile of bodies on your hands.
The puzzles start off easy - the Fun level is a gentle introduction to the game's mechanics - but the challenge skyrockets from there. The stage names will often hint at a suggested approach, but beyond that, the gameplay is fairly free-form, and many of the puzzles have multiple solutions. You're given the resources, but it's all on you to figure out what to do with them.
Much of the game's appeal comes from the charming graphics and sound, and the SNES port shines in this regard.
The new cutscenes look fantastic, as do backgrounds. They're faithfully adapted from the Amiga game (a few cases of censorship aside), retaining pretty much all of the original's detail and animation. The lemmings are smoothly animated, and though there is a bit of slowdown, it's impressive just how many of the creatures can end up moving onscreen at once.
The tiny bipedal rats have a lot of personality in their animations, and I love how they let out high pitched screams of terror as they're being slaughtered. Even better is hearing them shriek, "Oh no!" moments before exploding into millions of pieces. Ludicrous gibs, indeed.
And the soundtrack! It's a huge improvement over any of the PC versions from the early 90s, and it's one of my favorite SNES soundtracks.
The gameplay made the transition from mouse to gamepad far better than you might expect, too. (And far better than 3D Lemmings did on the PlayStation!) Some of the later stages require you do to several things at the same time, so the ability to move the cursor while the game is paused is a godsend, and the ability to scroll the screen and to switch the highlighted icon with shortcut keys streamline things quite a bit. It can be difficult to select a specific lemming when you have a huge clump of them penned in a small area, but that's the only real complaint I have about the way it plays.
But man, is this game hard! I had this game as a kid and I played it a ton, but I don't think I ever made it past the Tricky stages back then. My ten-year-old mind was apparently not equipped to handle much more than that. As an adult I find the game much less intimidating, but some of the later stages still feel (almost) impossibily difficult. If you like a challenge, this one won't disappoint.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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