Game:

The Lost Vikings (1992)

Category:

Tutorial

Duration: 11:29

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The Lost Vikings is a Puzzle/Platformer game made by Silicon&Synapse (Later known as Blizzard) and published by Interplay. It was released in 1992.

Blizzard also released it for free so it can be downloaded here: https://us.battle.net/account/download/
(Don't worry, it's easy to use as it uses a pre-configured Dosbox that runs it)


The 3 Vikings Erik, Baleog and Olaf live a peaceful life with their families and go out to hunt for food once in a while. Everything seems to be fine until one night a mysterious spaceship flies over the village and abduct the three friends while they are asleep. They wake up on the alien ship and have no idea whats going on.Now it's your turn to help them escape and get back home.

I think that Lost Vikings could be considered a "well crafted" game because instead of throwing the player right into it and let him figure out even the most basic things by using trial and error or reading the manual and thus wasting time, the player gets already taught all the gameplay basics within the 3 minute intro instead.You get to learn how to use the different characters correctly and even if you skip the intro the first few levels will serve as a tutorial that give you all sorts of useful hints and tips.

The game isn't really complex or hard but the way of introducing the game will let the players learn how to play it within a very short amount of time so they can concentrate on what matters here and that is solving the puzzles to get to the next level.

The only downside in my opinion is the saving mechanic. It uses a level code system so everytime you finish a level you need to write down a code so next time you can continue from there. It's the same system also used in Blackthorne, probably because the games also came out for the SNES. The problem here is that you basically need to play a whole level until the end or otherwise you will have to restart it from the beginning. This can get tedious and lower the general fun factor. Still I guess it's better than most other games of the time where you had to restart the whole game when you fail....that was even worse ^^

But like I said that's just my opinion ;)