Lemmings – DMA Design/Presage/Psygnosis - 1991 - First time playing?: Uh, this was my introduction to gaming and I've been playing it since I was 5. So, no.

Full disclaimer; If you're expecting an unbiased review, immediately I'm going to tell you this isn't it. I always try to avoid letting nostalgia cloud my judgement when reviewing games, but with Lemmings? Yeah, I’m going to try my best, but that’s a tough task for me, I have to admit. I adore Lemmings. As far as I'm concerned it's an absolute masterpiece without compare in the puzzle game genre. That isn't to say that there aren't puzzle games better than Lemmings, nor is it to say that Lemmings is perfect, but simply that no other entry in the genre fills the niche it does. A mishmash of logic puzzles, platformers and real-time strategy all in one, elegantly executed with surprisingly deep mechanics allowing for a vast array of puzzles with multiple solutions and replay value. Not only that, but it's brimming with character, humour and personality that is frequently missing from logic puzzlers which tend to go for a more abstract or minimalist aesthetic. It's an absolute classic through and through.

I love lemmings. The animal and the game. Lemmings are weird ass animals both in the misconceptions surrounding them and honestly even the way they act in reality. Walt Disney tried to convince the world that they are are prone to mass suicide because he's a horrible person that thinks watching cute fluffy things die en masse is wholesome family entertainment, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. In the 1500s, geographer Jacob Ziegler thought that lemmings fell out of the sky when it stormed. Natural historian Ole Worm meanwhile declared this rubbish. Obviously lemmings don't spontaneously materialise in rain clouds and fall out of the sky, they actually fly in the wind. This is just the stuff on the main Wikipedia article, I bet there's even more insane theories out there from the 1400s about how they explode and are escapees from hell or something. There is one bit of truth to these misconceptions; they're suicidal, but more in a “die in the glory of battle” kind of way. Lemmings are tiny little gladiators. They will stand their ground ferociously and try to intimidate you into submission if you go skiing near them. They do this by squeaking and doing feint lunges primarily. They're utterly terrifying, hell knows no fury like a nuclear lemming fighting for their life.

So they're adorable little weirdos with a lot of bizarre myths surrounding them, and thus DMA Design, future developer of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, used those misconceptions as creative inspiration for Lemmings. The lemmings presented in the game are somewhat more akin to dwarves. They're industrious little humanoids who are talented diggers, miners and builders, visually represented with green hair and blue robes, giving a fairly androgynous look, alongside a slightly dopey looking sleepy expression. They are very very adorable and loveable little things that you are going to see die gruesomely in medieval torture devices unless you guide them to safety. See, although it might be strange to imagine that there was a time when the developers of GTA were most well known for a cute puzzle game, it's the morbid humour that comes from the cutesy character designs combined with the horrific ways they can die that will leave you understanding how they eventually went on to become Rockstar North.

You don't directly control the lemmings yourself. Every level has a set amount of lemmings drop out of a trapdoor floating in the sky (how appropriate, considering the previously mentioned misconception) and it's up to you to rescue as many of them as possible by guiding them to the level exit. The lemmings walk forward on their own until they either hit a wall which will cause them to turn around, or they walk straight into a hydraulic press or something equally hazardous and obviously die. The way you indirectly control the lemmings is by assigning them skills with the mouse. Click on the icon of the skill you want to use on the toolbar at the bottom of the screen and then click on the lemming you want to give that skill to.

There's eight skills in total, all of which are extremely useful. Diggers will tunnel into the ground below them, miners dig diagonally with a pickaxe and bashers dig through walls with their bare hands. If you need to reach higher areas, the builder ability has a lemming build a brick staircase. The floater ability gives lemmings umbrellas with which they can negate fall damage by using the umbrella as a parachute, which they keep for the rest of the level. The climber ability is similar in that it is also kept for the duration of the level when assigned. This ability allows a lemming to climb up walls when they run into them as opposed to just turning around. Finally, there's blockers and bombers. A lemming assigned with the blocker ability will stop in place and prevent any lemming from passing them, instead telling them to turn around. Bomber lemmings meanwhile just explode and die. Yes, this actually has usages. It's often the only way to stop a blocker lemming from blocking, and the explosion caused by the bomber can also destroy terrain with the blast radius.

This is a lot to take in, but the game does a good job of easing you in and teaching you each ability one by one over the first few levels. The first level is near impossible to fail unless you go out of your way to do so, with the only ability available to you being the digger, which you simply use once in order to dig a tunnel through to the goal below. The second level is similar in that it only has a single ability that you need to use to win, but with a slightly more significant threat in that you're being taught how to use floaters, meaning that you'll have to give your lemmings those umbrellas before they walk off the cliff and go splat. The abilities you can assign your lemmings are gradually introduced like this for the first seven levels, and then the following 23 levels give you some simple obstacle courses with every skill available to you, usually with twenty usages for each of them. Your skill assignments are finite, so if you have twenty builders and you assign that skill to twenty lemmings, you won't be able to use any more builders for the rest of that level attempt. Twenty of every skill is more than enough for a ton of experimentation however, across a selection of not too demanding levels that give you the freedom to solve however you want.

Lemmings’ 120 levels are divided up into four level sets, each containing 30 levels. The first level set, called ‘Fun’, is what I've described to you so far. Following Fun are the ‘Tricky’, ‘Taxing’ and ‘Mayhem’ level sets, each of which is harder than the last. First time playing you're most likely to start feeling tested about halfway through Tricky. Levels will start giving you far less skill usages to assign to lemmings, frequently requiring some creative and out of the box thinking. Miners are used to dig diagonally down, so they wouldn't be of use to you if you wanted to get your lemmings up a ledge, right? Not necessarily. What if you instead have a climber go up the ledge and then mine a diagonal tunnel that exits out of the bottom of the ledge, giving all of the other lemmings a gentle slope for them to walk up? And now you're thinking with the kind of logic Lemmings is designed to train you in and then test you with.

Furthermore, skills can be combined in various ways to achieve even more results. What would happen if you used a miner to destroy the ground a blocker is standing on, for instance? What if you assigned a digger the basher skill mid-dig to change the direction they’re burrowing in? Turning a builder into a bomber is probably useless, but wait, what if the bomber explosion radius can blow a hole through the ceiling that couldn’t be reached otherwise? The possibilities are near endless with these tools and the superb synergy they share.

The thing to know about the skills in Lemmings is that they're not just rigid puzzle pieces to slot into a hole the exact same shape as it. They're versatile and have plenty of unconventional usages for you to discover over the course of playing the game. For instance, certain skills, even if not useful in the moment, can still be used to delay a lemming, keeping them busy while another lemming up ahead is working on making a safer route. For another example, If you don't have blockers but you need to make a blockade, then a miner Lemming digging a tunnel into a dead end could solve that problem. This is just scratching the surface, there’s so much more you’ll learn naturally through experimentation across the 120 levels.

This is where the replay value comes in. As you experiment and learn new techniques, you may end up realising that those levels you cleared earlier but lost some lemmings in could actually be cleared with no casualties. Many puzzles in Lemmings have multiple solutions like this, resulting in the game still being fun on a second playthrough, a rarity for logic puzzle games that frequently lose their luster once you already know the solutions. In Lemmings, you may know how to beat the level, but that strategy can still be refined. You can use less skills, save more lemmings, solve the level more efficiently and with a faster time.

It's fun to revisit Lemmings anyway because the whole game is so damn charming. The lemmings are extremely endearing dopey cuties with a lot of character, and seeing your solution come together with lemmings across the whole map all doing their part is immensely satisfying. It's pretty funny too. An early example of this coming right after the tutorial levels, with ‘Not As Complicated As It Seems’, a level that looks intimidating in the level preview due to being large and having the most complex level geometry you've seen so far, but then when you start the level you discover that the starting point of the level is right next to the exit and it's the easiest level in the whole game, just requiring you to use a single blocker and then immediately win.

The real highlight of Lemmings’ humour is just how morbid it is though. We've already established that the lemmings can explode, but what we haven't touched on is that little mushroom cloud icon on the status bar. That is the nuke. This is what you click when your attempt at solving the puzzle isn't going too well and you want to atomise the entire level. Selecting the nuke causes every lemming in the level to get assigned the bomber ability at once, no matter how many bombers you have available. It's quite the spectacle frankly, watching the entire level go up in fireworks as every lemming takes a chunk out of the level terrain before blasting apart.

Would you believe me if I said that the nuke is not the darkest thing in the game however? Oh, believe me, the nuke is frankly one of the tamer ways your lemmings can meet their end, as levels are also loaded with a variety of sadistic traps that will execute any lemming that stumbles across it. They can get burned to ashes by flamethrowers, flattened into a pancake by crushers, or even crushed into a goopy red paste by a giant rock. Yeah, how any of this got past literally every rating board across the world is beyond me. My personal “favourite” traps are the bear trap which chomps the lemming’s head clean off, and the snare trap which ties the lemming by the ankle and strings them up with such force that they're swung over the gallows and slammed into the floor. The Mac version is notably a bit more bloody as well. The bear trap decapitation was bloodless in the Amiga original, but that's not the case here. Seeing cute things die horribly is quite sad, but it’s also morbidly amusing due to just how catastrophically bad your failed attempts to complete these levels can go.

On a similar vein, let's talk about the special levels. Every level set in the game has one unique level in it that instead of using Lemmings' standard art assets is instead based off of another game published by Psygnosis, complete with the same music from the game being referenced. They're a very nice change of pace and a bit of fun fan service whenever they come up. They are also generally much easier than the levels before and after them, making them a good breather as well. The level based off of DMA’s Amiga shoot-em-up Menace was, um, an interesting choice, as you can see by the screenshot. It slaps honestly, it's metal as hell. The music really adds to it.

In spite of my adoration for this game, I still have complaints. Complaint number one; We All Fall Down. This is the name of a recurring level that is present in every single level set in the game. You have twenty lemmings, twenty digger abilities and a long thin platform which is just a couple of pixels higher than the maximum distance a lemming can fall without going splat. What you have to do to NOT go splat is have every single lemming dig, so that they fall from underneath the platform, thus closing the gap between the lemming and the floor just enough to not be in splatting distance. It's not fun when it first shows up, but then the game just keeps making you do it again every level set, but with the catch being that every repeat of the level adds more lemmings, until by the end you're having to squeeze eighty lemmings together to make room for all of them to dig to safety. Oh, and if you slip up and miss a single lemming, then time to restart because these levels can only be cleared with a 100% saved quota.

Complaint number two; Precisely selecting a lemming in a horde of 70 other lemmings all grouped together in a small enclosed space. Many levels require you to contain the lemmings at the start of the level with a blocker or other such blockade, while a single scout lemming goes ahead and builds a safe pathway for the rest. If you can just use a blocker and then have that same blocker explode, this is fine, but what if you have limited resources, can't afford to use a blocker or a bomber and instead need to use a builder to have the lemmings escape their enclosure via staircase? Well, at that point, selecting a lemming that's actually facing the same direction you want to build in is entirely a coin flip. When your cursor is highlighting 10 lemmings at once in a horde of even more lemmings because they're so tightly clumped together, who knows what lemming will be assigned that skill or what direction they'll be facing? There are ways to mitigate this issue, but they all require having surplus skill usages that you may not be fortunate enough to have.

There’s a few other levels that have a simple enough solution but are obnoxiously finicky to actually perform due to controls or just awkward terrain. The level in the screenshot below named 'Triple Trouble' springs to mind, a pretty basic single-screen puzzle that primarily just requires building a couple of ladders to the goal in the centre and having some other lemmings dig tunnels into the exit. In spite of that, this one took more retries than any level in the game due to a mixture of complaint number two alongside the left side of the enclosure with the goal in it being quite jagged and awkward for the builder lemming on the left to actually build to without bumping their head on a stalactite, giving up and turning back.

Furthermore, in any level at all, a single mistake can require you to start the whole level over. This is really obnoxious when you have to restart primarily down to bad luck, such as complaint number two often results in, but it’s also just a bit annoying due to several levels being very long and requiring a long string of precise inputs, especially on levels that require lots of building. To be fair, I don’t mind Lemmings requiring some dexterity and timing, making the game into more of an action puzzle game. Some levels just push it when you’re having to slowly and cautiously build across tiny platforms where being just a frame off means a reset.

Now, if you’ve played a lot of retro games and are used to them being on the punishing side, I think Lemmings is manageable enough. If any of these issues sound like game breakers to you however, I recommend NeoLemmix. This is a superb Lemmings fangame designed to minimise randomness and put the focus squarely on puzzles above frame-perfect dexterity. Such tweaks include being able to specifically select if you want to select a lemming moving to the left or right, having outlines showing exactly how far builder Lemmings can build, diggers can dig, miners can mine, etc, allowing for rewinding and framestepping and a host of other quality of life improvements to make Lemmings a much smoother playing experience. In addition to a remixed campaign based on the original Lemmings levels, there’s also a very in-depth tutorial teaching the more advanced techniques that I didn’t even know about, even after having played the game for over 20 years. If that’s not enough? There’s a ton of usermade campaigns ensuring you’ll never run out of Lemmings content. I absolutely adore it and can’t recommend it enough. Meanwhile, if you want a more faithful modern Lemmings fan project, check out Lemmini instead.

If you want an official version however? The Mac port of Lemmings is a superb choice. Well, mostly superb. All of the sprites and textures from the Amiga original have been redrawn at a higher resolution and they look great. This is similar to the Windows 95 port of Lemmings which also had high resolution sprites, but I personally think the Mac version looks even better than that later port. The lemmings have been kept cartoony as opposed to the odd realistic shading they were given in the Windows 95 port, but in the Mac version they also have extra details missing in the 95 port such as actual visible faces. The terrain looks good as well, it avoids that emulator upscale filter look that’s so common with 90s Mac ports. The new exit in the hell-themed levels however is odd to say the least. In all other versions of Lemmings the exit is shaped like a horned demon head, but here we’ve got a goofy looking buck-toothed gargoyle for the exit instead. The Mac version also has much less cut content than the 95 port that was missing the special levels (although the Mac port is still missing the multiplayer mode), while still retaining quality of life improvements over the Amiga original such as having a fast forward button to speed the game up with when you’re waiting for a lemming to get into position before assigning them a skill.

The one hurdle that prevents me from wholeheartedly recommending the Mac version however is that it’s much harder. For whatever reason, levels in Mac Lemmings are incapable of having more than 80 lemmings total, as opposed to the Amiga version where several levels had 100 lemmings in them instead. This doesn’t make too much of a difference in most levels, but the issue is that the required percentage of lemmings you need to save in order to complete each level hasn’t been tweaked to reflect this. So, if a level with 100 lemmings in the Amiga version requires you to save 90% of the lemmings in order to clear the level, that thus allowing for 10 casualties, in the Mac version meanwhile that same level will still require you to rescue 90% of the lemmings, but since you only have 80 lemmings that only allows for eight casualties.

This comes to a head in The Steel Mines of Kessel, one of the final levels in the game and the biggest hurdle to overcome in the Mac version. I hadn’t beaten the Mac version of this level until now, in spite of it being the first version of Lemmings I had played. I just skipped it with a level code as a kid in spite of getting through the rest of the game without cheating. First off, it requires you to save 90% of the lemmings just like the example described above. However, the level is heavily based around using bombers in order to blast through terrain. So, you can only use eight bombers in this level designed with the expectation of you using 10 bombers, that’s already bad enough as is. However, in addition to that, those nice high-resolution sprites are now here to backstab us. The thin roots growing out of the ground are meant to be so thin that lemmings can just walk straight through them. As a result of the roots being higher resolution and being considered thicker by the game as a result, they’re now solid objects, thus requiring using even more of your limited resources to get to the end. It’s a miracle the level is even still beatable at all, frankly, but it requires nearly frame-perfect blocking and bombing just to get through the first solid wall.

In spite of that, I still personally consider the Mac version of Lemmings the best version available at the time of release. The fast-forward button really does make a huge difference and prevents retries of the same level from being quite as tedious as they could be. Modern fan ports have surpassed it, but even so I still find myself wishing that I could have the cute Mac lemming sprites in NeoLemmix and Lemmini from time to time. It’s a shame that this version is so much more inaccessible now due to compatibility issues. My second recommendation for an official version of Lemmings would be the Amiga original. It sounds and looks much better than the more widespread but honestly pretty weak DOS port. If you want a console port, well, know the game will be much clunkier to play on a controller than with a mouse, but the Mega Drive port is excellent in spite of that, thanks to it adding sixty extra levels, bumping the already meaty 120 level long game up to 180 levels.

Right next to the likes of Doom, any time I get a new computer it doesn’t feel complete until I install a version of Lemmings onto it. My biggest complaint is that it set the standards for puzzle games so high that no game I’ve played since has been able to satisfy me the same way. You have my undying, slightly concerningly obsessive love for all time, Lemmings.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 20th November 2025