This was originally published on Blocker Trap on February 28, 2023. It has been only minorly edited for clarity and one updated opinion.
Ever since I first became aware that there was a scene for making custom Lemmings levels, I’ve kept at least one toe dipped in it. At the time that I started playing custom level packs on YouTube and subsequently discovered the Lemmings Forums after drawing a crowd from there, Lemmings had come a long way from the last time I’d dabbled in it. In my earliest days on the internet, around 1998 or ’99, when I got the bright idea to go looking for level editors for games I liked, I remember using a DOS program called LemEdit (distributed by a company called VTM Hypermart) to make my own levels, though I never finished any good ones, and in hindsight I’m not sure where I would have distributed them if I had. You had to overwrite the original game’s levels, which were stored in batches of 10 in .DAT files, to preserve your own. Or maybe there was a method slightly less permanent than overwriting. I don’t know. I only knew my way around it well enough to tinker.
In the previous decade, the most advanced way to play Lemmings was via Lemmini, a Java applet by a German developer named Volker Oth that used the Windows 95 port of the original game as a base atop which to overlay a more robust engine. It was a gorgeous program, taking mostly after the Amiga version of the game, with the lemmings themselves receiving a graphical glow-up and more fluid animation. Even in those days, its quality-of-life enhancements were easily enough to make it a far preferable means of experiencing the original Amiga/DOS game. In addition to implementing sorely needed replay and fast-forward features, it pioneered touches that eliminated some of the frustrating luck required to complete certain levels in the original games, like allowing you to choose a lemming walking in a specific direction by holding down the corresponding arrow key. It wasn’t perfect—you still had to beat levels in sequential order, which is how I got irrevocably stuck on my initial run of PimoLems—but it was pretty swell for its time. You can still install Lemmini on a modern system, though not without your computer giving you the business about it now that Java’s not-insignificant security threat status has forced it into obsolescence. The most recent version of its latest spinoff, SuperLemminiToo, was released in December 2022.
The original release of PimoLems sometimes relies on quirks of the Lemmini engine that don’t hold sway anymore. For instance, the sides and top of the field of play are treated like walls and ceilings even if there’s empty space there, and lemmings can climb the empty space and bump their heads on it as if something actually existed there. Not so in NeoLemmix, where several levels have had their architecture slightly modified to make their original solutions tenable once more. There was also a glitch in Lemmini where sometimes a basher working rightward wouldn’t complete a tunnel if it began bashing from just the right spot. I don’t think that factored into any level solutions, and I feel like there might have been a level or two that could have been backrouted1 by doing so, but it did serve as an occasional source of frustration.
Anyway, it was for this application that a French creator by the username Pieuw (a name I’ve always imagined is pronounced as though one was to say “Pierre” with a speech impediment, and although I recall him once telling me it derived from somewhere else, I don’t remember where from) developed PimoLems, and in which I first played it back in 2013. When revisiting it recently, I played the NeoLemmix conversion, which necessitated some minor tweaks that are worth viewing under the microscope of critical analysis, though not until after I talk about PimoLems itself.
Just like the original Lemmings, PimoLems has four standard difficulty progressions, here named after weather patterns: Calm, Windy, Stormy, and Hurricane. It also boasts a feature that to this day remains uncommon in custom Lemmings packs: nonstandard difficulty ranks. Most creators just sort each level in a pack into one of four or five escalating categories and call it a day. DoveLems scratched the surface of this sort of thing with its five-level Bonus section, but PimoLems has fully themed groupings of levels, including Pickaxe, which focuses on miners, and One, which exclusively features levels with a one-minute time limit. I wish more level packs had these sorts of “gimmick” sets, where the creator digs deep into a particular design space and tries to maximize the potential of a particular task or limitation. Many levels in One especially are among the most entertaining in the pack.
The Special set features three levels (five in the NeoLemmix release) with a distinctive castle-themed tileset, which was far less common to see in the Lemmini days than it is now. Rounding things out is Extra, which contains twenty mostly easy miscellaneous levels that either have a high-concept shtick, are like the tedious bridge-building levels of yore but even longer, or involve a lot of walking across long horizontal planes. Whatever the case, these don’t have a lot of payoff or pop; Pieuw tossed them in there because he thought they were too easily backrouted or else didn’t fit anywhere else.
Playing it in 2023, I didn’t start having real trouble until the back half of Stormy. The difficulty in the front half of Hurricane vacillates wildly; I would go back and forth between having no idea how to even start making headway in one level and instantly grokking another, and alternating like that literally from one level to the next. But then the last quarter of the pack really ratcheted it up to something more consistently challenging. I’m pretty free with looking puzzle solutions up these days, because my gaming time is limited and some levels are frankly a less interesting nut to crack than others, but once I start doing it for every level, I begin to realize I’m out of my depth and I should go do something else, like a different set of levels, or neglected housework.
I think PimoLems sits somewhere off to the side of DoveLems in terms of difficulty. Lemmings set the initial bar, and though it’s a lot easier than its reputation would suggest, it’s hardly a pushover. Oh No! More Lemmings came in and amped it up significantly; I would say it’s actually as hard as people think the original game is. To this day, I consider DoveLems and PimoLems the next natural steps up from ONML, favoring the former slightly more. DoveLems takes many of the design elements of classic Lemmings to their natural conclusions. It demands more from the player than ONML without getting too abstruse. It features some conventions you don’t see as often anymore, like repeating level designs, and I think it’s the most creative Lemmings fan game among those that operate exclusively within the “classic” milieu. PimoLems is also harder than ONML, but portends more frequently than DoveLems some of the brain-melting esoterica that I think occasionally plagues modern custom Lemmings. (DoveLems really only stepped in it bad one time that I remember offhand, with the notorious “A Z That Stands for Zemmings”, a level that’s tough as nails no matter how many frame manipulation and precision tools you have access to.) That said, there were still many levels I thought hit a solid sweet spot, including:
There was only one level in Windy I had to look up the solution to, “From Pillar to Post”. Perhaps not so coincidentally, it is also the only level in that set to which pickup skills2 were added in the conversion to NeoLemmix. It was that anomalously difficult and stressful level in the midst of an otherwise relaxing difficulty set that caused me to begin dwelling on NeoLemmix, and what it’s done both for and to Lemmings level creation.
* * *
NeoLemmix was built to bring the engine known as Lemmix up to speed with similar engines like SuperLemmini and Lix, but it ended up very quickly surpassing them and cementing itself as the de facto way to play classic-style Lemmings. Its array of quality-of-life enhancements is stunning even compared to what Lemmini once offered. Among these are the ability to move both forward and backward by single or multiple frames; guiding outlines that tell you where a builder’s bridge or digger’s tunnel will terminate, or a bomber’s blast radius; an instantly accessible ruler that will show you whether a lemming will die from too great a fall; animated triggers for traps to make them easier to see, as well as an easily toggled graphical mode that shows you exactly where those triggers (and other things like steel areas) are; and the ability to save and load replays. Few puzzle games can boast of such a comprehensive suite of tools to help the player succeed. As lavish as this all sounds in theory, however, it’s kind of a double-edged sword. In the quest for precision and perfection, NeoLemmix has gotten a bit far adrift from the simplicity that made the games so great in the first place.
For starters, the amount of skills has been increased from eight to 21, and I’ve seen recent experimentation on the Lemmings Forums Discord with allowing as many as 16 unique skills in one level (NeoLemmix currently allows ten, two more than classic Lemmings). Most of the additions are imports from Lemmings 2: The Tribes, including the platformer, the swimmer, the jumper, and the fencer. Some, however, are original creations, like the stacker, which can build a small wall high enough to prevent forward movement; the disarmer, who can permanently disable traps; and the stoner, which does kill a lemming, but turns it into a statue that’s coded as a piece of terrain and can be manipulated as such. There is also a cloner that turns one lemming into two, making it possible to require a higher number of lemmings to be saved than a level starts with. There are also a couple of pretty interesting NPC types: neutral lemmings that are gray and can’t be assigned jobs at all, but must still be rescued, and zombie lemmings, which also can’t be assigned jobs, but can turn regular lemmings into zombies on contact, making them unable to work or leave the level as well.3
If this sounds like a lot to absorb, that’s because it is. Now add the ability to make levels that can scroll horizontally and vertically, which opens the floodgates for the sort of airplane-hangar level design platformers in the 90s were lousy with, and you start getting into some fairly murky waters. Part of what helps mitigate the difficulty of Lemmings is that most levels are set up in a way that gives you a very limited number of possible moves. You know you only have so much of this or that task to work with, and you know you can only effectively use them in a small number of spots on the map. So you can narrow down possibilities via methods like dividing up what should be used where or reverse-engineering a path from the end of the level to the beginning. Without lifelines like that to hold onto, this process of elimination suddenly becomes much tougher and much more overwhelming.
On a more nuts-and-bolts level, NeoLemmix makes some choices that do not exactly meet with unanimous approval in the custom Lemmings scene. From what I’ve seen, its most controversial change to the game’s core mechanics is that it eliminates timed bombers. I view this as pushback against Oh No! More Lemmings specifically, which leaned far too heavily on the crutch of walking bombers to amp up the difficulty of too many levels, and so in that sense I can see where it comes from. The downside to it is that it makes some levels from the classic era absolutely trivial, like the Taxing rating’s “Bomboozal” and the final level of [Oh No! More Lemmings, “LOoK BeFoRe YoU LeAp!” (wacky capitalization sic). I didn't mind instant bombers for a while, but these days I'm back to wanting the timer. Others are also on record as disagreeing with immediate detonation, like the creator of SuperLemminiToo, who made the ability to turn on timed bombing a huge selling point of his engine.
Levels in NeoLemmix also usually give you infinite time to solve them, unless the time crunch is a vital aspect of the design. The philosophy behind this is one I largely agree with. The most important thing tends not to be the amount of time in which you can execute a solution, but whether you can solve it at all. Time limits have either nothing to do with that or everything—there’s not a lot of in-between on that. When a level in Lemmings gave you eight minutes on the clock, it was nigh meaningless. Better to do away with it entirely in those situations, I say.
But ultimately, for me, the most concerning thing NeoLemmix is not any one of its features, but rather its community’s approach to iteration. Remember "From Pillar to Post"? The PimoLems level I mentioned earlier? I noted that it contained pickup skills. This is another feature of NeoLemmix, adapted from (if I recall correctly) Lemmings Chronicles. They’re little yellow circles with a skill icon inside them, and when a lemming passes over the trigger point of one, one (or more, if there’s a number indicating as much on it) of that skill will be added to your inventory. They add yet another puzzle element to a version of a game that’s already full-to-bursting at the seams with them. But in certain older level packs that have been converted from older engines to NeoLemmix, like DoveLems and PimoLems, you sometimes see them deployed differently—namely, retconned into old levels as a means of barring access to backroutes players have found over the years.
I’m deeply torn on this practice. On one hand, I feel fairly certain that in a community as tight-knit as the Lemmings Forums, Pieuw is aware of the type of maintenance being done on his levels and at least tacitly approves of it. I know if I made a level pack, I probably wouldn’t have much time or inclination beyond a 1.0 release to devote to upkeep. If I ended up feeling inadequate about it later, I might greenlight some second-party assistance. On the other hand, part of me is like, Who asked you to do that? These aren’t your levels. I admit I’m not as deeply invested in other game customization communities, so I’ll allow that it might happen, but in my experience, you never see, for instance, a new version of a Super Mario World ROM hack come out where someone who had nothing to do with the original development of the hack is like, “Hey, I noticed you can cheese this level by flying over it, so I uploaded a new version that has an invisible ceiling and doesn’t let you get enough of a running start to take off.” People have their creations tested as best they can, but despite their best efforts, shorter routes might unintentionally slip through. Some people would call this a flaw. I call it part of the charm. The mechanics of Lemmings are already as tight as game mechanics get; if you discover a faster way through a level, the satisfaction of being able to see things through a more efficient prism is kind of its own reward. But then apply that to your own work, I say. Don’t keep picking at someone else’s level until it’s barely recognizable, however imperfect it originally was.
I think what makes me bristle at the thought of this is the fear that if this was done to my levels, I would somehow feel like I was losing authorship of them to some degree. But some light tinkering can be negotiated. One thing I know I could never brook would be someone else adding entire levels I didn’t make to my level pack. This only briefly occurs here, but it still unsettles me. The Lemmini version of the Special rating in PimoLems has three levels, but IchoTolot, the user who generally oversees these sorts of conversion projects, put in two of his own to bring it up to five. I guess 145 is a nicer-looking number than 143? But for me personally, if I wanted to play IchoTolot’s levels, I’d download one of his packs. I’ve never made a whole level pack—only ever made isolated levels here and there—but it’s hard for me to imagine myself approving of any kind of outside change or supplement to my own work. I can see how this might come across as weird, precious, or even mildly hypocritical, since we’re all playing in somebody else’s sandbox to begin with. But I’m just trying to articulate something I’ve always sort of acutely felt with NeoLemmix, which got thrown into sharper relief when I experienced some facets of the conversion of PimoLems.
If you would like to get a comprehensive grasp of what’s expected of a custom-Lemmings player these days, the NeoLemmix Introduction Pack is probably your best bet. Even this so-called “beginner” pack is an illuminating experience. There you’ll learn that tricks that would once have been considered quirks of the engine—things that would have been considered neat to be able to do within the parameters of the game’s programming but not essential talents—are now required curriculum. If it’s the kind of thing you think you might be into, you can go ahead and jump into the deep end. If you find it a little off-putting, you might want to experience fan interpretations of Lemmings sparingly, or use a modern engine to play older levels, like the Sunsoft Genesis exclusives, in a more comfortable way. I’m somewhere in the middle: I still like to see what new and wild creations folks have brewed every now and then, but I often find myself quickly foundering and retreating to the comfort of older material.
I’ve probably come across extremely critical here, but the fact is, I love NeoLemmix. I don’t think I can ever go back to the DOS experience. When it comes to playing classic Lemmings, it is the way to fly, bar none. I’ve recommended it in internet spaces where classic and/or custom Lemmings has come up in conversation, and will continue to do so in the future. Nevertheless, I’ll never be able to fully shake the feeling that it might be too much of a good thing. 💘
Footnotes
1 A “backroute” is a scene term for a solution to a level that is much easier to find and/or execute than the one intended by its creator. Backroutes are sometimes achieved through glitches. They may also exploit a feature of a level’s layout in a way that didn’t occur to the designer. Such a solution usually leaves several job assignments unused. A classic example from the original Lemmings is level 17 of the Mayhem rating, “Stepping Stones”. You’re intended to build over an intimidating pool of acid and line up your bridges so that they terminate directly over tiny floating bricks only a few pixels wide. But if you use your builders skillfully enough, you can use them in the nook to the left of the entrance to get up to the ceiling and bash all the way through it to the end of the level. If they hadn’t included a ceiling in the level, it wouldn’t have been possible.
2 Pickup skills are what they sound like: job assignments you don't start the level with that have to be picked up by a passing lemming.
3 Zombies in particular are notable as the only surviving vestige of what was once a whole host of gimmicks that included wacky mechanics like rising water and lemmings that walked backwards but still did all their jobs facing forward—all of which were eventually scrapped. A mini-pack of 21 levels showcasing zombie lemmings, called Doomsday Lemmings, captures the essence of the mechanic quite nicely.