The Lost Vikings

The Lost Vikings for Game Boy Advance is a single-player puzzle-platform game released in 2003. It brings Blizzard Entertainment's early 1990s adventure to Nintendo's handheld, with Mass Media handling the GBA conversion. The game follows Erik the Swift, Baleog the Fierce and Olaf the Stout: three Vikings abducted by the alien ruler Tomator and scattered through a succession of strange places as they try to find their way home.

Each stage is built around moving all three heroes safely to its exit, but no one Viking can solve the route alone. The player switches between Erik, Baleog and Olaf as needed, planning around platforms, hazards, enemies, doors and mechanisms. A defeated Viking can leave a stage impossible to finish, so keeping the group intact is as important as reaching the next screen.

Erik is the quickest of the trio. He can run, jump and use his helmet to break certain walls, making him the Viking for gaps, heights and fragile barriers. Baleog supplies the group's combat and ranged interaction: his sword deals with nearby threats, while his bow can strike enemies or activate distant switches. Olaf carries a shield that stops attacks; it can also become a platform for the others and lets him glide through the air, opening paths that neither companion can manage alone.

The Lost Vikings GBA steadily combines those abilities with useful objects such as keys, bombs and food that restores health. Items can be passed among nearby Vikings, and puzzles ask players to decide who should carry an object, operate a switch, absorb danger or provide a foothold. The result is a side-scrolling game where timing and movement matter, but observation and the order of actions usually provide the real solution.

The journey moves through varied settings, including prehistoric, Egyptian, factory, jungle, candy-themed and alien areas. Its humorous science-fiction premise gives the medieval-looking heroes an intentionally anachronistic backdrop, while short exchanges between the Vikings add character to their predicament. The GBA cartridge contains 37 levels, providing a long sequence of increasingly involved challenges rather than a collection of disconnected action stages.

This handheld edition is a port of the first The Lost Vikings, originally designed by Silicon & Synapse and published by Interplay in 1993, not its 1997 sequel. It largely preserves the original game's structure and character-based puzzles while adding battery-backed save slots in place of the older password approach. Unlike the Genesis version, the Game Boy Advance release is for one player and does not include its multiplayer modes or extra Genesis stages, making it a portable take on the original three-Viking escape.