I've put a full longplay of my PICO-8 version of Lemmings online, showing all 100 levels and their solutions.
I'd still encourage everyone to try figuring the levels out themselves first, or just move on to another level and come back later if you get stuck. But since I've had quite a few questions from people who got stuck, or even wondered whether certain levels were possible, I thought it would be useful to have a complete longplay available.


Have fun, and good luck saving those lemmings!

Hi all! 👋
I've put a full longplay of my PICO-8 version of Lemmings online, showing all 100 levels and their solutions.
I'd still encourage everyone to try figuring the levels out themselves first, or just move on to another level and come back later if you get stuck. But since I've had quite a few questions from people who got stuck, or even wondered whether certain levels were possible, I thought it would be useful to have a complete longplay available.


If you haven't tried the game yet, you can find it here on itch :
https://buzzard1337.itch.io/lemmings

Have fun, and good luck saving those lemmings!

Good job you had viewers watching your stream to say "actually you had to save 20/20" 

IIRC isn't there a jingle that plays in level when you reach the goal save requirement? Shouldn't that suffice?

Quote from: WillLem on August 24, 2026, 02:27:44 AMDid I miss something? We're not talking about timed bombers here, we're talking about framestepping. The original point stands: a lot of L1 levels feature challenges related to general timing and crowd control, which are rendered trivial by the ability to framestep.

Right. I mentioned timed bombers specifically because those are the clearest example where the entire level is trivialised. Other than that, I can think of specific activities in levels that become not an issue any more (such as precisely placing a miner so that it outputs where the crowd can climb into the tunnel), but those levels still have puzzle aspects. I guess there are levels like "The Crossroads" that are are entirely an execution challenge, but still a small minority of the levels in the game.

Quote from: Proxima on August 24, 2026, 02:06:39 AMThere is no such thing as cheating in a single-player game

Fair enough. A better way to put it is probably "it undermines a big part of the game's challenge", which - in the case of L1/L2/L3 - was to solve the levels in real-time as much as possible as well as solve the puzzles.

Quote from: Proxima on August 24, 2026, 02:06:39 AM

QuoteWe all agree that the ability to framestep backwards immediately renders most of the original levels (which is what many players come to the Forums looking for) obsolete.

Out of 120 levels, there are five timed bomber levels in the entire game. ONML has only two out of 100.

Did I miss something? We're not talking about timed bombers here, we're talking about framestepping. The original point stands: a lot of L1 levels feature challenges related to general timing and crowd control, which are rendered trivial by the ability to framestep.

Quote from: Proxima on August 24, 2026, 02:06:39 AMIt's true that the original game didn't have any kind of replay system ... if it had had replays from the beginning, I can't see that anything I liked about the game would have been changed or diminished.
...
And then UU got added, nothing really changed, and it was still the same game, just easier to play.

Fair enough. There's a very good chance that adding the ability to jump backwards a bit (possibly via savestate loading) won't ruin RetroLemmini's general gameplay and will just save the player time, which is an important consideration and the reason for this topic in the first place.

Any Rewind feature will no doubt be a balancing act between making the game better to play, and retaining as much of the old school 'charm' as possible.

Quote from: Proxima on August 24, 2026, 02:06:39 AMI know that maybe it's not my place to say these things ... I'm mostly contributing because I hope this discussion can help you reason out the decision

This is much appreciated. All feedback is good, all opinions are valid and helpful to the outcome one way or another. Thank you for taking the time to contribute your thoughts!

Quote from: WillLem on August 23, 2026, 06:25:19 PMFramestepping, on the other hand, is tantamount to cheating in a game like Lemmings.

There is no such thing as cheating in a single-player game, unless it has some form of player-player interactivity (such as achievements, online leaderboards, etc).

QuoteWe all agree that the ability to framestep backwards immediately renders most of the original levels (which is what many players come to the Forums looking for) obsolete.

Out of 120 levels, there are five timed bomber levels in the entire game. ONML has only two out of 100.

QuoteHm. Maybe I disagree that it doesn't make for a good game. If that's true, why are we all here? The vast majority of original Lemmings ports don't even have a replay system, let alone per-frame control over the gameplay. It can't be that bad a game if there's an entire Forum dedicated to it...

I'm here for the custom levels (making, solving and discussing), the challenges, and the community most of all. I haven't played original Lemmings for years.

Of course, I loved it when I played it as a kid. I loved saving the cute creatures, the music, the graphics... but most of all, the feeling of being challenged to work out how on earth it was possible to solve these levels, and feeling great when I got those moments of insight that made everything fall into place at last.

It's true that the original game didn't have any kind of replay system, whether because it would have been too tricky to code given the limitations of the time, or because it wasn't a common feature in games, or because the developers simply didn't think of it. Still, if it had had replays from the beginning, I can't see that anything I liked about the game would have been changed or diminished.

But I finished the original games decades ago (not counting ones like L2 and L3 that didn't interest me enough to look into them), so the only reason I'm interested in modern clones at all is their ability to support creating and playing new levels.

I know that maybe it's not my place to say these things. I haven't played any Lemmings content for a long time now, and when I do come back to it, it'll be NL for sure. So my opinions shouldn't have much weight in the direction RL takes. I'm mostly contributing because I hope this discussion can help you reason out the decision, so that whatever decision you end up making, it's done for good reasons.

QuoteConversely - when I'm playing in NeoLemmix/Lix, I use backwards framestepping, of course - why wouldn't I. But, it makes the game feel totally different. Specifically: there are no real-time stakes at all. Nothing I do really matters because I can just skip back and redo it immediately. It feels like I'm editing a video clip rather than playing a video game. This is fundamentally a different way to play, and it matters.

This reminds me a lot of things that were said before the decision to add unlimited undo to Deadly Rooms of Death. Specifically, I remember one poster who was vehemently against UU because he wanted moves to feel "consequential". And then UU got added, nothing really changed, and it was still the same game, just easier to play.

It might surprise you, after the things I've said, that I actually don't use UU in DROD myself. But it does have single undo and checkpoints; if the choice were between enabling UU and having to restart the room every time I made a mistake, then I would have enabled it from the moment it was possible to do so 

But anyway. In a game like Lemmings or DROD where levels (or rooms) are distinct units of play, there are no "stakes" in any case. The only possible consequence for failure is loss of time. And that matters a lot more to me now that half of my life is behind me, and so much of my time is lost through feeling exhausted. I want the games I play to respect my time, and if I feel a game doesn't, I'm much more likely to close it and find one that does.

And while I appreciate that you prefer to play without replay features, that in itself isn't an argument for not adding them. If those features are there, people who prefer to play without them can still do so, while if they're not, everyone is forced to play without them regardless of what they prefer.

Quote from: Simon on August 23, 2026, 11:38:59 PMDebugging idea

Thanks for the ideas

For now, I've guarded against re-entrancy for treeview and preview loading, both of which are relatively expensive tasks. They've already been fairly well optimized, but I realised that there's nothing actually preventing them from being called multiple times. Multiple quick-succession clicks would be a problem, then.

The re-entrancy guard should hopefully do it. Flopsy is testing now.

Caching is a very good idea, but... it would need to perform a cache every time it opens/closes to keep it up to date (potentially?).

Quote from: Simon on August 23, 2026, 09:42:29 PMIn DOS Lemmings 1's We All Fall Down, I now believe that digger-digger cancelling isn't possible in a way to produce a permanent staircase. Your 2-digger solution is thus NeoLemmix-only.

Those are not the only two platforms! Digger cancelling is possible on Amiga, Mac, Genesis and SNES (although Genesis doesn't allow RR changes while paused, and I believe that means WAFD requires 3 diggers minimum).

Flopsy filed this after a discussion that his level loading was slow. He said that some Lix levels took 5 seconds to load on cold disk cache, and similarly NL levels took a while to load. This can be mere coincidence, or it can point at a real connection.

Debugging idea: Introduce artificial delay in level loading or in tile loading. E.g., every tile loaded freshly from disk should make its loading thread sleep for 100 ms, or do some absurd extra file I/O like logging numbers from 1 through 10,000. Maybe the delay helps with reproducing this bug?

-- Simon

Jingles or other sound effects can help. Fireworks/party streamers/ticker tape/confetti. 'CONGRATULATIONS!' in big green letters. A Lix holding a trophy for a win. A Lix crying for a loss