Holiday Lemmings: full of psychotic snowmen and icy precipices

They’re small, they’re cute and this time they’re dressed up as miniature Father Christmases, complete with red capes and fur-trimmed hats. Brilliant, eh? You have to guide up to 99 of the little fellas over 32 snow-covered levels – complete with fairy lights, psychotic snowmen and icy precipices – until they reach their Christmas pudding-shaped home. It’s all exceedingly jolly and seasonal with a suitably manic Roobarb and Custard parpy synthesiser version of Jingle Bells to get you in the Yuletide spirit, and there are two difficulty levels to make the gameplay that bit more taxing.

While the objective of Lemmings is the same for each level, it never becomes a monotonous experience for several reasons. Those miniature tri-colour creatures that are falling from the sky are the lemmings. They look like tiny blips in your visual field. Tiny, baby, pixel darlings that just need a bit of a hand to get from A to B. Your job is to assist them to reach their burrow in safety. The next thing to point out are the multiple different tabs at the bottom of the screen, which are like command buttons. Each one has a different function. For instance, the ‘blocker’ lemming stops any other lemmings from getting past it, and the ‘digger’ lemming is able to break through surfaces.

Players must use the cursor to click on the desired function, and then click on a lemming to assign it that function. In level 1, a digger lemming is all you need to win. This is nice and basic, the perfect way to get players into the swing of things. But as the levels progress, so too does the complexity, and therefore the strategic planning you must use. The last thing to note is that each level is timed, and if you don’t save all the lemmings quickly enough, they will all explode.

news source: various sources / image source: Generationamiga / watch on Youtube / download Holiday Lemmings 1993