I was really excited that Gobliins 6 recently came out on Steam and Itch and wrote way too many words about why I love it on the No Escape forums. So I’m doing the normal thing and expanding on that post even more. If you haven’t played the Gobliiins series, it’s a weird French point-and-click adventure game in a series that started in 1991. The rest of this post will be about why I think the series is interesting and some of the quirks but the TLDR is: it’s good! You don’t need to play previous entries.
Anyway, it’s a series where you control a group of goblins that you switch between to solve puzzles. The entries vary on how many you play as at a time, and it’s technically an adventure game but they typically follow a level-based format where you have some specific goal and you solve puzzles to accomplish that goal before you move onto the next level. The original three games were created by Coktel Vision and designed by Pierre Gilhodes and Muriel Tramis. Muriel has a FASCINATING career. She’s known as the first Black woman video game designer and many of her games are focused on anti-colonialism or erotica. The Gobliiins series is not about either, but Pierre and Muriel did eventually do a game called The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, which has all the goofy humor of the Gobliiins games but is anti-colonialist. It’s a weird game but I love it. Most people in the US who know of these games probably know about them because Sierra bought Coktel Vision and published their games here. They even renamed the third game to Goblins Quest 3, to make it sound more like King’s Quest/Police Quest/Space Quest, which is so goofy to me since it’s this bonkers French game but there you go.
Eventually Coktel Vision was closed and Pierre and Muriel split off to do their own things. I don’t think they ever had a falling out because they mention each other a bit in interviews and he did art for her book. I think they were just tired of games. Then in 2009 Pierre got the rights to the IP and made Gobliiins 4, which is…..ehhh. The 3D art is not amazing and it takes a long time to really get going, but it’s there I guess. My understanding is that the game improves quite a bit in the second half of the game. You cannot buy this one anywhere today and it’s abandonware. Muriel got a special thanks in this and I think consulted a little but wasn’t really involved.
And then in 2023 he did a Kickstarter campaign to fund Gobliiins 5, which was made in Adventure Game Studio and has 2D art again. It’s great. It’s a return to form for the series and even with the janky setup (it’s split into four launchers because it was a solo project by an older guy learning a new game engine), it was a treat for fans. You can now get this on Steam and Itch.io. This repeated again two years later with another crowdfunding campaign for 6, which just came out this week. It was nice to see Muriel Tramis come back for this one to help with puzzle design and I hope this means she is back to making games again.
So what are the quirks with the series? Well, every entry in the series has a different number of i’s in the title based on the number of goblins you rotate between. So Gobliiins 1 has you switching between 3 characters, Gobliins 2 has two goblins, and Goblins 3 just has the one but you occasionally have other characters you play as anyway. Gobliiins 4 and 5 are sequels to the first game and have you playing as the three characters from the first game again and Gobliins 6 is a direct sequel to 2, where you play as the two characters from that one. Despite all this weird lore stuff, it doesn’t really matter. It’s just people walking around doing puzzles and goofy slapstick stuff happens.
If I were to recommend a game in the series to folks, I’d probably say to start with 3 or 5, depending on if you want something old school or not. It’s very hard to recommend 1 because it’s the only one with health meters where you lose health every time your characters get hit, which is when all the funny stuff happens, and uses a password system. The health system gets dropped with the second game and from here on, the goblins can get beat up as much as you want. The puzzle design gets better with each entry too, which 3 having much better puzzles than 2. The other weird quirk with the old ones is that people generally prefer the floppy disk versions over the cd-rom ones, because the music changed and people don’t care for it as much (I think it’s fine either way). You can pick up the original trilogy on GOG, which features both the floppy disk and cd-rom versions of the games.
Anyway, this is way too many words about a weird series of French games but I like my weird French DOS games so there you go.
