adventure games

Frog Detective 2: The Case of the Invisible Wizard

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Developer: Grace Bruxner, Thomas Bowker
Publisher: worm club, SUPERHOT PRESENTS
Year: 2019
Genre: Adventure
System: Mac

a rhino named Mary saying "Have you heard of extortion?"

I continue to replay the Frog Detective series but this time with my middle child. This one has you investigating a parade in a small town prepared for the arrival of an invisible wizard that has been ruined and it’s up to you to find out who did it. It plays very similar to the first game, which is not a complaint at all because I really enjoyed that one. The mystery itself has a cute resolution and I liked exploring the small town at night more than the island in the first game. There’s a bit more to look at in this one so I felt it was a more interesting environment to explore. The game also features a little notebook that tracks clues for you and you can mark who you think is suspicious or not. None of this is essential to completing the game but it’s all very fun to play with and my 6 year old treated it all very seriously as she would change who was suspicious or not after talking with each person. It was the perfect game to play with her since it let her roleplay being a detective without having to make any actual decisions on who ruined the parade, which has a happy ending anyway. The game only takes 60-90 minutes to play too, the perfect length for something to play in a sitting. I always liked these games but I appreciated them a lot more after playing them with my kids.

Frog Detective 2: The Case of the Invisible Wizard is available for Windows and Mac on Steam and Itch.io, PS4/PS5, and XBOX.

What Bands Have Played Myst?

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This Sunday morning I am thinking about multimedia cd-roms by musicians in the 90s and thinking: “did they play Myst?” I do not care about if any musician was actually a gamer, but because I am a huge dork I keep thinking about the band Queenscryche, in their stage gear, crowded around a desktop computer and trying to figure out the marker switches on Myst island. Because I have nothing better to do, here are my thoughts on various musicians with computer games and if they’ve played Myst. Many of these games are abandonware and playable on modern Windows thanks to The Collection Chamber.

Peter Gabriel, star of Xplora and Eve: Yes, absolutely. He seemed to be very interested in the cd-rom format since he started a games company that produced his two games as well as Ceremony of Innocence. He also contributed music to URU: Ages Beyond Myst and acted in Myst 4

Laurie Anderson, Puppet Motel: I think it’s likely she tried it for a few minutes to see what it was like since she’s stated she has an interest in new technologies and using them when no one really knows what to do with them. She has also done VR installations when VR was becoming a thing again in the mid 2010’s. But according to this interview last year about Puppet Motel, she doesn’t really enjoy games and winning/losing states so I assume she moved on once she “got it.” People should play Puppet Motel.

Aerosmith, 9: The Last Resort, Revolution X, Quest for Fame: Why did people keep going to Aerosmith to ask them to be in their computer game? Only one of these is an adventure game (produced by Robert Deniro) and they just act in it so they barely qualify for this list, but I think they’re aware of what a cd-rom is and that’s it. They’ve probably played some pinball. This is the most I want to think about Aerosmith.

Dan Ackroyd, The Blues Brothers: We know he actually played The Blues Brothers video games but I do not think he played Myst or else we would have seen some sort of cd-rom. Since John Goodman was in the Blues Brothers in the sequel, this is also where I can say that I do not think John played Pyst.

The Beach Boys, Surf City: Absolutely not. Mike Love cashed the paycheck and that was the end of that. If I had to pick the Beach Boy most likely to have played a computer game, I think it’s Al Jardine.

Earth, Wind, & Fire, Isis: Today I learned they had a computer game! I don’t think it’s likely they played them but now I want to play this.

Herbie Hancock, Virtual Nightclub, Living Jazz: He must have at least tried Myst, right? He seems too curious about technology to not have. Anyway, Herbie Hancock rules.

Devo, Adventures of the Smart Patrol: I think Mark and Gerry at least tried it and saw games as the future of the band. This did not happen since the game wasn’t very good and flopped, but the promotional video has that energy. They poked at smartphone apps a few times so new technology is something they have an interest in but I don’t think they ever dug too deep.

Queensrÿche, Promised Land: As much as I want to imagine the band playing Myst, I do not think they have. However, I am fascinated by the MobyGames credits for this game. The brother of one of them is all over the place on this and all the band members are listed as co-designers of their worlds. I don’t buy it.

The Residents, Freak Show, Bad Day on the Midway: Yes, but the band were all in costume when they did. From reading the Laurie Anderson video, it sounds like Voyager and Inscape were the ones reaching out to the bands to make something and not the other way, but I do think the fingerprints of The Residents are all over these and their involvement was more than just cashing a paycheck.

Motörhead, Motörhead: This predates Myst and Lemmy absolutely did not play computer games, but lets all imagine him playing Myst anyway. EDIT: I’m wrong about this one. Lemmy did play arcade games. See the comments below.

Prince, Prince Interactive: I have no idea how much he was actually involved with his game but I think it’s very likely he tried Myst. He was too interested in computers and the internet not to have. He was also probably one of the first people ever to have played The Oregon Trail.

David Bowie, Jump: The David Bowie Interactive CD-Rom, Omikron: He was too interested in technology not to have, since he also had his own multimedia cd-rom (that he wasn’t a fan of since it wasn’t ambitious enough) and Omikron. I think Duncan Jones is over answering questions about his dad since he has his own career and art to talk about, but maybe he would still be up for answering “What computer games did you play with your dad?” since I think most folks like to talk about that.

Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Frankie Goes to Hollywood: They broke up before Myst and I don’t think they were involved with their game either but this Making Of article about the game is good.

Rolling Stones, Rolling Stones Voodoo Lounge: Absolutely not, but I think their producer Don Was has.

Rednex, Inbred with Rednex: Well they know what a computer is because they keep taking down videos on YouTube of people playing their game but I think that’s as far as that goes.

Well that’s all I have to say about all of that. Feel free to comment with your thoughts about other musicians and if they’ve played Myst.

Meanderware thoughts

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a skull saying "All it takes to create for the old school web is to know that you can. It never went away. It's still here!"

Developer: alienmelon
Year: 2026
Genre: Interactive Essay
System: Browser

Meanderware: Things I loved about cyberspace is an interactive essay collecting various thoughts on the indie web and how ephemeral the internet and digital art can be. It’s probably obvious from the description that it’s something I would love but it’s so expertly crafted that I want to recommend it to everyone.

a skull saying "It's about the journey This is why the indie web will always matter. We exist on our own terms, and create on our own terms. The internet is for everyone."

The game (I’m still calling it a game) mostly takes place as a first person exploration of a virtual space with you coming across doors that link you to external websites about the internet and dialog windows modeled after tooltips as seen in the screenshots above. The game has an aesthetic inspired by 90s software and internet graphics but is more than just nostalgia bait, with the essay exploring what the internet could be and how we can build that. It references the Internet from the 90’s because it needs to discuss how it has evolved over the decades, but never falls into the trap that things of this nature often seem to. It doesn’t lecture you on how the internet was better and ignores all the issues that the internet had during this period and I felt that all of the themes of the essay were communicated very well through the 3D space you explore.

The essay also addresses one of my biggest gripes with Internet nostalgia. People will frequently lament that the internet just isn’t what it used to be and it’s too bad it’s all gone, but it isn’t! People still use forums (see previous posts on here), and people still make their own personal sites on places like NeoCities. It’s all still there, just being covered up by a heavily commercialized layer of apps that make it harder to discover. What I really love about how this game addresses it is that it provides you with some of the tools to build your own site and weird internet tools. I really appreciate that this essay wants to say that the internet can still be weird if you want it to be.

a green grid with a giant tower coming out of it. Error windows cover the landscape

Part of the game is about discovering little corners of the web that become very meaningful and how short lived they can be. This brought back so many memories of being on forums in the 00’s and how important they were to me at the time, even if they were generally pretty silly places. AdventureGamers.com just died last year after being around for decades, and was a place that I spent quite amount of time at. I still think about these communities quite a bit even decades after I have left them.

On an unrelated note, is this the first game to reference HappyPuppy? It has to be?

To be honest, we all know this review could have been summarized by that overused gif of Meryl Streep pointing and saying yes, but I hope that me endlessly praising it will encourage you to check it out and perhaps even create your own website.

Meanderware: Things I loved about cyberspace is available in the browser on Itch.io

Perfect Tides: Station to Station thoughts

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Developer: Three Bees
Publisher: Three Bees
Year: 2026
Genre: Adventure
System: Windows

Perfect Tides: Station to Station is a point-and-click adventure where you play as Mara, an eighteen year old woman who has just started college. You experience all that college has to offer you while obtaining new ideas and applying them to papers and other forms of writing. This will be a slimmer and more rambling post because I feel like everything I have to say about the game has already been said by other outlets such as Unwinnable but I thought the game was brilliant and is now one of my favorite adventure games.

a woman saying "Hey, no need to be embarrassed. There was a whole summer I read nothing but computer game novelizations I found in a box behind a grocery store."

One of the many things I was pleasantly surprised by was how much of an improvement it was over the first Perfect Tides, a game that I also thought was very good and well crafted. I was just so surprised by how much more confident this game was in its design, willing to drop more conventional things people expect in adventure games like the multiple verbs and puzzles the first game had, in order to focus more on the choices Mara can make and ability to learn new things. I think having difficult puzzles in this game would have just killed the pacing and wouldn’t fit in with the grounded story this is telling.

Learning new topics was also a really interesting thing to see in an adventure game. It’s been done before of course, this game cites The Dagger of Amon Ra as an influence, but in a way that feels so natural and continuing to explore and talk to other people will improve your knowledge on a topic. It’s masterfully implemented.

Everyone that is of a certain age who plays this will probably relate so much to the references this game makes as well as just what it was like to be a college student and they’re right! For better or worse, I could relate to Mara and just the experience of being a bit of a walking disaster in my late teens. If you don’t relate to that, well, it must be nice to not have that experience.

Anyway, I loved the game and hope it is very successful since it has some of my favorite writing in an adventure game and hope it inspires others to tell personal stories as well.

Perfect Tides: Station to Station is available on Steam and Itch.io, and is coming soon to Nintendo Switch.

DAWN CHORUS [DEMO]

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Developer: haraiva, isyourguy, unseconds
Year: 2026
Genre: Interactive Fiction
System: Browser

pop up windows describing hums and a conversation between people texting
Screenshot taken from Itch.io page

DAWN CHORUS is an upcoming interactive fiction game that recently had a demo put online after being shown at ALT: GAMES 2026. The 30 minute demo tells a story about two friends and a band named Dawn Chorus while the world is falling apart. I loved how it uses links that pop up new windows to expand on the world the game is set in, and the art and music do a fantastic job of contributing to the melancholy feeling of trying to live your life while the world is ending. I think the influences section is worth reading too. The sad feeling the game has reminded me a lot of Kentucky Route Zero so it was fun to see that listed after I had played through the demo. It also lists a few DOMINO CLUB games if you want to see the Jupiter Engine and make a game yourself that uses the popup window functionality this game has.

game screenshot saying how a hum can be heard in some parts of the world including Windsor, Ontario

Something that caught me by surprise was the brief mention of the Windsor Hum. I always get excited about things local to me appearing in video games so that was a fun reference. It was a humming noise that people in Windsor, Ontario could hear from 2011 to 2020 and probably came from a factory on an inland between Canada and the USA but was never completely confirmed. You can read more about it on Wikipedia. There’s also a song by Detroit post-punk band Protomartyr that references it.

There’s not much else I can say about the demo without spoiling it but I think it was very well written and I’m looking forward to the full game.

DAWN CHORUS [DEMO] can be played in the browser on Itch.io.

The Dissident by Wavey Games

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Developer: Wavey Games
Year: 2026
Genre: Adventure
System: Windows

a woman at a table with a lit cigarette
Screenshot taken from Itch.io

As a longtime (3 years) fan of Wavey Games, I was very excited to see that they just released a new game. The Dissident is a short pay-what-you-want first-person point-and-click adventure game where you must assist someone escaping the authorities by helping her get into her own dreams by fixing and using an altered tape recorder. It’s a very surreal plot and the whole game follows this vibe but not at the expense of the puzzles, which all felt very fair. They were the right level of challenge for this type of game, where I did have to pause and think for a minute but nothing too tough, which I think is good in a game like this where the draw for me is exploring the world. The game’s puzzles also provide a few points where it makes the most sense to map something or write some notes, which I enjoy doing in adventure games.

One thing I really enjoy in the works of Wavey Games is the use of retro aesthetics that people generally don’t think about. Their previous games Melon Head and Celestial Coffee Quest (highly recommend both) both used an EGA-palette and this one has a CGA-palette. Even though I considered the CGA colors to be incredibly ugly at the time when DOS shareware games were coming out, it’s fun seeing it intentionally selected for the look of a game and I think it’s used very well here. Most of the game has a nice jazzy soundtrack too, which all fits in very well with the weird but relaxed mystery vibe the game is going for. It’s just a nice little adventure game that you can play in a sitting so go check it out and then play some of the other adventures by Wavey Games if you like this one.

The Dissident is available on Itch.io for Windows and Mac.

Frog Detective 1: The Haunted Island thoughts

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Developer: Grace Bruxner, Thomas Bowker
Publisher: worm club, SUPERHOT PRESENTS
Year: 2018
Genre: Adventure
System: Mac

a frog saying "do you know anything about that cave?"

Frog Detective 1: The Haunted Island is a short first-person adventure game where you are a detective who is also a frog and need to investigate reports of a ghost haunting the island. My oldest has been playing the series on her own and her younger sister wanted to see them so we just played through the first one together. I’m glad I got to revisit it because I liked it more than I remembered and my daughter loved it. I had always liked the game but I had some small gripes about the game that were much more minor than I remembered.

The gameplay is very simple. You walk around and talk to various characters on the island, asking them about the ghost, other folks, and if they need help with anything. You continue doing this and helping them with their needs and it eventually leads you to the end of the mystery and game. The puzzles are very simple and there’s no fail states, which may frustrate some experienced adventure gamers, but the focus of the game is on the humor and art and I think that makes it a great intro to adventure games for folks. It’s also fun exploring the space that Grace created, which is filled with a lot of fun little details to look at if you aren’t trying to rush through the game.

The gripes that I had with the game before still remain but are much more minor than I remember. The puzzle solving is a bit repetitive since it’s mostly dialog puzzles you solve by going from person to person but again, I think it’s mostly fine since it’s not meant to be a challenging game anyway. The other issue I have is that the humor does start to feel repetitive towards the end as well, but the game is very short (45-60 minutes) that once I had started to feel that way, the game was getting to wrap up anyway. It was also much easier to overlook since I played it with my 6 year old and she was having a great time walking around and talking to everyone. I think playing the game with someone who doesn’t have Gamer Brain really helped me appreciate that it’s a game filled with lovely artwork and that I should just take my time exploring this space instead of viewing it as a series of conversation puzzles to solve.

I have to imagine that anyone who is reading this already knows about the series and has either played it or never will, but maybe this recommendation will slightly nudge you towards checking it out or replaying the game.

Frog Detective 1: The Haunted Island is available for Windows and Mac on Steam and Itch.io, Nintendo Switch, PS4 + PS5, and Xbox.

Indie Game Roundup (March 13, 2026)

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It’s Friday the 13th, the most cursed day for indie games. A lot of people are weird about hobbyist game devs and I would just like to say, you all rock and are making some of the best games. Please keep putting cool stuff on Itch.io and elsewhere, and making things with weird little game engines. Here’s some of those games and also some by people that somehow manage to do it full time. It’s going to be a long one since I didn’t do one last week so I’m splitting it into smaller categories. I’ll try to do another one of these posts soon because there’s a bunch I still plan to write about, but just don’t have the time today. If you enjoy these posts, maybe consider playing one of my games. Most of them are free.

Adventure

Choicebeat #16 is the latest issue of the free zine for adventure games, visual novels, and interactive fiction.

collage of photos of someone on a trail

Apologies in advance for this one because I don’t actually know what it is but saw it recommended by folks and it has FMV so this is one where I’m just going to copy the description and you can decide if it’s interesting or not. kevin’s PLAYING in berlin (Steam/Itch.io) is an IGF Nuovo Award finalist consisting of three games. In Ke Vin, evin asked 200+ questions around the Berlin Wall in a language of the body without verbs. The audio was recorded in Kyiv. In What if Ginger is a Religion unlock a brand new language with a unique writing system. You’ve Received XX Messages in a Language Unknown Even to Its Speaker is an emotional ASMR game.

You Are Elon Musk (Twine) is a simulator created in Twine where you play as Elon Musk and see how much you can do for the world with his obscene amounts of wealth. It’s the sequel to You Are Jeff Bezos and even more depressing than that was, but also very funny. It’s got quite a few endings in it and I haven’t even found any secret endings yet.

Back in the Swamp (Steam) is a first-person point-and-click adventure set in a post-apocalyptic swamp. I haven’t played it yet but I like the art and it reminds me of 00’s-era adventure games, which I actually mean here as a compliment. It’s got a demo too.

Game Jams

maze of skulls
Skellywave

The CGA Jam wrapped up on Itch, where folks made games for DOS using the CGA standard. While it was a set of colors people hated at the time, I think it can look really nice at times. There’s 9 brand new DOS games for you to play here.

The Trans Joy Jam (Itch.io) was about creating brighter futures for trans folks

Fake Game Magazine jam (Itch.io) is, as you would expect, a jam where people make free game magazines.

Platformer

person with shotgun shooting at green blob monster

Haunted Lands (Steam) is an EGA-era looking platformer inspired by the classic DOS game Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion and the rest of that trilogy, which was created by some ID Software folks. I was a huge fan of that series and this looks to build on that with even more gore and more playable characters. If you want to get a feel for it, you can try some previous games/prototypes on the Itch page.

a ball of moss climbing up a wall. Bubbles fill the room

Moss Moss (Itch.io) is a nice non-violent metroidvania made in PICO-8 where your goal is to cover every surface in moss and discover secrets. I really liked the mechanic of covering everything in moss to unlock new areas. Playable in the browser.

Return to Dark Castle (Steam) is a rerelease of a game that came out on Mac only about 10-15 years ago, but now for Windows and Linux as well. It’s the sequel to a classic Macintosh game from the 80s, which I used to play the Amiga port of with my dad. I remember it being very hard and from the Steam description, that still seems to be the case.

Puzzle

Swappy (Itch.io) is a demo for a puzzle game made in PICO-8 where you must get each character to their goal and swap characters around to get through obstacles. It’s hard to explain but is easy to pick up if you try out the browser demo. I liked it and hope we get more levels.

RPG

Mowguelike (Itch.io) is a roguelike for browsers where the main mechanic is using your lawnmower to mow grass in every level, as well as using that lawnmower to fight enemies.

top down view of people playing basketball and someone saying "I think, therefore I jam"

Hoop Dungeon (Steam) is a basketball turn-based tactical roguelike game and I think that is a really interesting premise. It’s just entered Early Access and there’s a demo available if you want to try it out. The same developer made Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation (Steam), a postcolonial 4X game, and I highly recommend that one to Civilization fans.

TTRPG

places to be is a free (Itch.io) systems neutral location creator zine using a 1d20 and 1d6.

Other Bits

A new indiepocalypse (Itch.io) is here, featuring a collection of experimental indie games. I can highly recommend the fmv typing game how to walk out the door.

Demos

1-bit view of a person in a room with lots of writing on the walls

SALANN (Steam/Itch.io) is a first-person rpg with a nice 1-bit aesthetic where you explore a decaying city.

Wishlist

chicken running from an exploding king crab

I was told about Gonzalo the Chicken – Episode I (Steam), a low poly 3D platformer where you are a chicken and throw your explosive friend at enemies. You can watch the trailer for it here.

Super Robot Survivors (Steam) is a new Survivors-like by the creator of classic games like Halloween Harry and Flight of the Amazon Queen.

That’s it for this week! Hope you found something new to play. Feel free to mention your games to me in the comments/email/DMs if it doesn’t use AI. I also live for comments on what you’ve been playing lately. Have a nice weekend!

The Adventure Game Assessment Thing

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Recently a group launched an Adventure Game Aptitude Test as a one-day event where people logged on to play an adventure game while being on a webcam to make sure they don’t cheat. It turned out to be the game Maniac Mansion, which needed to be completed in four hours which…..ok. I think this was all meant to be a goof, which is perfectly fine and good and this post isn’t a dunk on that, it just got weird when a few games outlets and The Gamers started having takes on it past “haha, fun goof.” These takes seemed to be a combination of “wow, adventure games were so obtuse/difficult/unfair back in the 80s” and “wow, gamers can’t hack it anymore.” and neither of these is accurate.

These games were meant to be played over long stretches, with players thinking about puzzles when not playing them, and discussing solutions with friends and family. No one was beating Maniac Mansion in four hours back then. Maniac Mansion, at least in my opinion, is not even an unfair game. You still have to think about puzzle solutions and stuff for four hours straight. That’s exhausting. You’re still meant to step away for a bit to process it. These games were just not built for marathon sessions like that. As someone on Bluesky said, you can also complete a crossword puzzle in a couple minutes but you generally don’t.

I also think adventure games, even new ones, are generally more fun with played with friends over Discord, except when I want to be moody or depressed by myself when playing something like Norco or Kentucky Route Zero.

If I do have a criticism of the adventure game assessment, I do think it’s stripping the game from it’s context and putting it in one that it really isn’t meant to be played in and if you’re going to do something like that, you should probably give some setup unless you’re trying to make up a narrative for people to run with. Yeah, some of them have bad puzzles and I think softlocks are annoying, what else is new. My hot take about those is that I actually think a lot of the early Sierra/Infocom stuff holds up better than the late 80s/early 90s stuff because it’s so easy to whip through the game again and it’s much more straightforward about it being a treasure hunt for points or whatever (being extremely reductive here, I know it’s not that simple) where the later games are quite a bit longer and telling more elaborate (and better IMO) stories, but then you’re hit with these really frustrating interruptions where you may have to restart the game and it really hurts the storytelling. This is also why I’m a bit defensive of mid-90s Sierra, which I feel like adventure gamers generally dump on but I like. Oh well.

Anyway, all of this is to say, I will happily play weird French adventure games with friends over Discord.

A Brief History of Gobliiins

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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.

three goblins standing outside a house
Gobliiins screenshot from MobyGames

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.

two goblins outside a castle. One is holding a bomb
Gobliins 2 screenshot from MobyGames

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.

a goblin standing on a floating pirate ship
Goblins 3 screenshot from MobyGames

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.

3 goblins standing by a dragon skeleton
Gobliiins 4 screenshot from MyAbandonware

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.

three goblins at a birthday party
Gobliiins 5 screenshot from Steam

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.

screenshot from gobliins 6 showing a variety of characters in a bar
Gobliins 6

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.