Edge of Tomorrow (inspired by the brilliant short novel All You Need is Kill) is one of my favourite popcorn flicks. The movie opens on the eve of a major assault against alien forces that are sieging humans from the ocean. Major Cage (played by Tom Cruise), a man with literally zero combat experience, gets busted down to private because of his cowardice, and is ordered into the fray on the frontlines of the conflict. The humans get ripped to shreds within moments of landing - they’re outclassed and outgunned by the aliens. Cage ends up trapped, his suit unpoweredt, and is attacked by one of the alien alphas - but before he dies he grabs a claymore that explodes in the alpha’s face. They both die...but in killing the alpha, Cage has somehow gained its powers to endlessly relive the last 24 hours. So he rewinds back to the start of the day as a penal private right before the major offensive.
Yep, it's a time loop movie.
Each and every time Cage hits the beachhead, he gets a little bit further. He learns when to pause, how to avoid falling debris, when to duck and where to anticipate enemy movements from. And then, when he reaches the end of his known experiences, he almost immediately dies - the aliens are absolutely deadly. One wrong step and he gets stabbed, exploded or crushed.
All the risk in Cage’s time looped adventure is back-loaded. He spends most of the day repeating the same steps - talking to his squad, doing pushups, going on runs around the base. After all the drills and battle speeches, he finally gears up and gets ready to drop. He runs through the limited steps he knows to ensure his safety on the battlefield and has to desperately figure out the next, before inevitably dying a few moments later. And with the extra three seconds of knowledge, Cage has to run through it all over again - he wasted the previous 23 hours just so he could inch slightly further.
This is what playing The Lost Vikings (TLV) feels like. Its long periods of repeated gameplay that you already know how to complete because you’ve done it all before. And then, right before you finish a level, you make one slightly wrong move and are forced to do it all over again. It combines the worst aspects of puzzle games and platformers into an ugly brew, one that was a struggle for me to swallow. The individual elements in this game are all defensible - in fact, many of them are quite intriguing - but its a game that’s far worse than the sum of its parts.
I played The Lost Vikings for my podcast a couple of months ago, as part of James determined effort to select obscure games that no-one has ever heard of. It's a puzzle/platformer, released in 1992 by Blizzard, long before they became the industry giant they are today. You take control of three vikings (only ever one at a time) as you guide them through each of the 42 levels as they try to find their way home through space and time.
The puzzle aspect of the game comes from the restricted set of abilities each viking has. Erik can run quickly and jump to reach high places. Baelog is your combat guy, wielding a sword and bow. Olaf has a shield that infinitely blocks enemy attacks and traps and can use his shield as a hang glider.
A typical puzzle sequence might involve you using Erik to jump up to a raised platform and press a switch to disable an electrified barrier. You then need to lead with Olaf through the newly opened area, as a trap starts spitting fireballs out at regular intervals. Once Olaf has closed the distance, you switch to Baelog to kill some enemies in the next area, and shoot at a switch with his bow and arrow, opening up a drop for Olaf to hang glide through. Of course, it gets more complicated than this, but that's the general gist - you have to use each viking in turn against the obstacles that they are strong against.
That’s only half of the game though. The other half is its platforming, and the ever looming presence of instantaneous death.
Miss a jump and fall into some spikes? Shish Kabobed. Get hit by a fireball? Incinerated. Lean too close to one of those electrified barriers? Electrocuted! All instantaneously, with no respawns, no extra lives and nothing to do except start the level over. In a cruel twist, one of your vikings dying doesn’t even mean the level is over - it lets you play right to the end with just one or two - and only lets you know of your ultimate failure at level’s end.
But so what, right? I’m always advocating for more difficult games, and this game certainly fits the bill. What exactly is the problem?
I have no intrinsic problem with insta-death. In fact, some of my favourite platformers - Celeste, Super Meat Boy and VVVVV - are entirely predicated around this concept. Super Meat Boy even plays a simultaneous montage of every single one of your deaths at level’s end, drenching your screen in blood from all your failed attempts. The difference between these more modern platformers and TLV is in how long it takes to respawn, to get back into the action after a death.
In the gif above, it took me less than 5 seconds to die twice, respawn, and complete this mini-platforming section. Instantaneous death is followed by immediate respawning, to try again and again. There are checkpoints placed on every single screen (with the exception of specific, optional challenges) so essentially no time is lost between attempts to clear the section. Every effort has been put into minimising the downtime involved while playing the game.
In the screenshot below, on the other hand, is a typical The Lost Vikings level:
There are no checkpoints, despite it being 10 times the size of a level from VVVVV. When one of your Vikings dies, you aren’t immediately ricocheted to the start to try again. And the absolute slog of having to repeat everything you already know how to do is ten times worse than in the aforementioned platformers. You can get 90% of the way through a level in TLV, die, and then have to repeat everything you’ve done up until that point. Mechanically, that means doing something like the following:
Switch to Olaf, run forwards until you hit an enemy. Switch to Baelor, run forwards until you can attack and kill that enemy. Switch to Erik to jump over a spike filled pit and lower a bridge. Switch to Baelor again until you close the distance on a trap. Switch to Erik to go through a teleporter and disable that trap. Switch to Olaf and move forwards ETC. ETC. ETC.
The first time you play through this, it doesn’t actually feel that bad. A lot of the fun from the game comes from the puzzle side - it's often not clear how exactly you’re meant to progress. And maximising each viking’s skill set feels satisfying. When everything is firing, they feel like a well oiled machine, covering one another's weaknesses. Its when you know what to do, and how to do it, and still have to repeat those damn processes over, and over again, that I became frustrated with the game. The constant tabbing between the different vikings, the way I had to always lead with Olaf for fear of hitting another instant death trap - this wasn’t puzzle solving, nor was it challenging. Playing the game became an exercise in rote repetition and busywork, at least until I could get to the new and unknown part of the game that I was up to.
So much of this pain filled experience could be alleviated with a simple change. See, there’s a game that I love to bring up in these articles, and on discord, and on the podcast, to the endless annoyance of my friends. It has punishing death mechanics, ones that force you to repeat a lot of content that you’ve already completed. It has renowned difficulty spikes, enjoyable combat, and fantastic atmosphere.
The game I’m talking about, of course, is Da-Hollow Knight!. Hollow Knight has segments of its map without checkpoints that are easily the size of a level from TLV. Difficult platforming sections are interspersed with combat bits, and you’re often venturing into the complete unknown, where traps and surprises await around every corner. But for all their similarities, Hollow Knight strikes an important difference: There is no instant death.
If you miss a jump and would be impaled on spikes, the game just resets you back to the last time you were on solid ground, to try again. You don’t get essentially unlimited tries like in Celeste, but you do get enough to insulate you from making one mistake. You have to make a series of mistakes in a row in order to get sent all the way back to the last checkpoint and have to repeat your progress. And yes, when that happens it's still frustrating - but you can accept it, because deep down you know that you deserved that death. It wasn’t randomness or a slip of the mind, it was your fundamental lack of ability. So you accept your mistake and make the long trip back, trying to play more tightly and accurately.
When this same thing happened to me in TLV, I didn’t feel the slightest touch of zen. I thought it was stupid. I would navigate my way through a level, only to land one pixel slightly to the left of where I needed to, and then have to repeat the entire thing over. The proportion of punishment and pain for one single, small mistake is completely out of whack. Part of the joy of playing video games is to improve your ability to play the game and eventually achieve a sense of mastery. But The Lost Vikings has no interest in you merely playing well. You either play perfectly, or you make no progress at all. Anything in between is a hair pulling experience.
When there’s no gradient between success and failure, you don’t get the feedback of improving your skills. This is a fine thing for puzzle games, which are centred around long periods of confusion, followed by an ‘aha!’ moment where everything clicks. But getting better at platformer games is all about experimentation and feel, executing a difficult set of aerial maneuvers in a row. Death in these games isn’t failure, it's there to teach you how to play. By the time I got back to where I died in TLV any memory from the last death was long forgotten.
The most tragic thing of all is that there’s a great game lurking somewhere deep inside The Lost Vikings. The premise of a puzzle game where you control three distinct characters, one at a time, each with distinct strengths and weaknesses, is fantastic. And it's one that’s basically unique in video game history - even something like Trine plays in a very different way. The platforming side of the game, however, introduced elements that actively detracted from the puzzle mechanics on display.
But even with those platforming elements retained, TLV could still be improved significantly. There’s a health system already present in the game - fall damage and enemy attacks will take off only 1/3rd of a Viking’s health bar. If death pits and traps were to do this same level of reduced damage, resetting you to the last platform when relevant, the game would feel far less frustrating. Even allowing you to finish a level without having all three vikings could save you from situations where an 11th hour mistake cost you the last 30 minutes of playtime.
The Lost Vikings is a game for the history books. Not because of what it does well, but because of what it fails to do. When combining two genres, it's essential that the gameplay becomes a fusion of overlapping ideas singing together in harmony. If instead you take concepts like instant death and fuse it with long and complicated puzzles, you end up with a game at war with itself. I wouldn’t mind playing the puzzle version of TLV, or even the platforming one - but the fused monstrosity that exists in our universe exists to serve only as a lesson for those that came after it.
