193. Eggerland: Meikyuu no Fukkatsu (HAL Laboratory, Famicom, 1988)

The last game in the Eggerland / Lolo series of difficult black pushing puzzle games is actually the first, at least the first released on a Famicom cartridge. While the series started on the MSX computer and had a prior release on the Famicom Disk System, Eggerland: Meikyuu no Fukkatsu ("revival of the labyrinth") is the last game I own in the series.

Surprisingly, this is not the worst game of the three, as I thought it would be because it was older. Don't get me wrong, you can definitely see the age. Graphically, stages just have black backgrounds, and the enemy and item sprites look cruder than ever. Lolo, your character, has less fluid animation, but I think design-wise he looks better and has a bit more character when he is defeated.

As in Adventures of Lolo, Eggerland has a 5 life limit and password system, but the early levels are a bit simpler than in Adventures of Lolo, so the game is easier to digest. Mechanically, it's more of the same block pushing, enemy freezing, one mistake and you have to restart game. For some reason I've always felt like I'm missing out by not having played a Sokoban game, but really those are just more basic versions of Eggerland, so I think they would just end up frustrating me.

2/5, a marginally more balanced version of Adventures of Lolo