Croustibat review

Developer: Coktel Vision
Publisher: Findus
Year: 1995
Genre: Adventure
System: DOS

a boy and a girl standing on an island with a saw in a tree and a mole holding a mirror

After issuing a challenge to folks to blog about an obscure game, I figured I should probably engage with this as well so I pulled a game that has been sitting on my backlog for a long time, Croustibat. Croustibat is an advert game for the Croustibat line of fish products by Findus and prominently features the mascot, a fish that is also named Croustibat. Apparently you could get the game by sending a letter to Findus along with the money to cover shipping and handling. The game was developed by Coktel Vision, the folks who developed the Gobliiins series of adventure games. It plays very similar to those games, especially Gobliins 2.

You have two characters, a boy and a girl, and must solve puzzles by doing your typical adventure game stuff like picking up items and using them on objects. There is technically a plot about aliens attacking a boat but it’s basically non-existent in the game itself, with instructions focusing on getting to the next location. Only specific player characters can successfully use objects and inventory items, but you don’t really know who until you try both player characters. Much like the Gobliiins games, the lack of hints or instructions mean you do a lot of brute forcing in this one as well. I didn’t think it was as frustrating as some of those games though, since it’s aimed more towards children and you are only on one screen at a time so the amount of objects to interact with is very small. I think this is a good thing. I am a fan of the Gobliiins series but nearly all the games in the series have a few puzzles where you brute force item combinations just to make some progress. That said, there was still a moment or two where I did not understand why the solution I tried worked, which is never a great sign.

I suppose the main gimmick in this one is that during each screen/level, the Croustibat mascot’s hat will appear. Picking it up will make the mascot appear and give you fish sticks, which make you extra strong. This is only ever used by the girl and exists to help her with a specific puzzle on each screen such as cutting down a tree. I’m assuming there’s someone out there on the internet that is physically attracted to the Croustibat mascot but I’m not going to confirm that.

a muscular fish with a hat saying "my friends! These fish fingers will power you up!"

Unlike Gobliiins, none of the player characters are interesting to watch or really do anything funny when you fail to do an action, which is sorta the highlight of those games. It makes sense, you aren’t going to beat up children too much in an advert game for kids, and there’s still moments like a child being frightened by a spider or a coconut falling on their head, but it does mean that there isn’t a lot going on. The kids don’t really have their own personality like the Gobliiins games either. I still think the art for all the characters is charming enough though and it has some fun animations.

My only other real gripe is that you need to transfer items between characters and it frequently just did not work for me so I had to keep trying until it would eventually work.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the game if you’ve never played the Gobliiins games before, unless you have a fascination with advert games or a strong nostalgia for 90’s adventure games. It’s not actually bad but it’s also not very interesting either but there’s worse ways to spend 15-20 minutes. I think the game is far more interesting if you played the Gobliiins series since it is by the same devs, plays very much like an easier Gobliins 2, and even uses a lot of the same sound effects and cursor. You can find the original French version across the internet since it was a free game but I played the unofficial English translation on the Internet Archive, which is playable in the browser but I downloaded it and ran it in ScummVM.

On a weird final note, my 6 year old saw me playing Croustibat and said “Are you playing that Goblins game?” I didn’t even think I had played any of those with her before (maybe Goblins 3?), certainly not in a long time, but now I will be thinking about if I play too many weird French DOS games around my kids or not. Then again, I could also get that Gobliiins Collection on the Switch which features mouse support for the Switch 2.

Croustibat is available on your favorite abandonware site such as MyAbandonware, with the unofficial English translation on the Internet Archive.

Knytt Classic

Developer: Nifflas and Bit Kid
Publisher: Bit Kid
Year: 2026
Genre: Platformer
System: Windows

Knytt screenshot of people hanging out by the water, someone laying down, someone fishing, a house and trees
This game has so many little guys

I have fond memories of playing Knytt so I was very happy to see that it got an official rerelease recently to celebrate the game’s 20th anniversary. If you haven’t played it before, it’s a freeware game where you have crashed on a planet and need to explore the planet by platforming around and finding parts to repair your ship. There’s no combat and only a handful of enemies that can hurt you. If you touch one of them or a hazardous element of the planet like lava or water, you teleport to your most recent save point. The save points are scattered frequently around the world so it is not an issue if you touch something you shouldn’t. The world itself is fairly big and maze-like, but you can also hold down a button to have the game point you in the direction of the nearest ship part, so it never feels overwhelming. It’s an incredibly chill game and exactly what I needed to replay at this moment.

It was just really nice to revisit the game since it had a big impact on me in college, when it originally came out (lol I’m old). That, and Seiklus (EDIT: I originally got it mixed up with Within a Deep Forest, another freeware game I recommend), a similar game with a relaxing vibe, both seemed like they came out sorta around the same era when there was maybe an explosion in freeware games. I wasn’t a part of any scene so I was just stumbling across this stuff on sites like Game Hippo and Retro Remakes. Laura Michet’s blog has far more interesting thoughts about this game than I do. It’s just a game that means a lot to me because I didn’t really have the money to spend on games and really appreciate that there were folks making some really interesting stuff for free. I suppose you could argue that stuff like Steam wasn’t really taking over yet, but you still had folks selling games digitally so they maybe could have figured out a way to make money off it. I don’t know. It bummed me out that some of the discourse from the Manifesto Jam was about how folks releasing games for free devalues them and hurts people making paid games. Not only is it not true, just look at the last 50 years of computer games, but teenagers like video games too. Ah well.

I still haven’t played the new extra difficult modes that were added for this rerelease. I might poke at them a little bit, they’re probably not for me, but I think it’s fun that they’re there.

Anyway, give it a look if you never played it before. It only took me about an hour to beat on my first run and I think it’s a nice, free game.

Knytt Classic is free on Steam and GOG for Windows/Mac/Linux.

Help Needed For Finding the Earliest Known Queer Game

Recently I wrote about Caper in the Castro, what is often described as the earliest known queer game, but it turns out that there may be games older than that and the internet needs you (yes, you!) to help. Jason Scott from The Internet Archive recently made a post on Bluesky asking for help tracking down two queer games that may or may not have been released.

OK, let's start the search.Adrienne Shaw is on the lookout for two titles of early LGBTQ software that predate Caper in the Castro. One is called VAPOR PALACE. The other features Tom of Finland art but has no discovered name yet. The search is on – if you know more details or… have a copy? ping.

Jason Scott (@textfiles.com) 2026-07-04T00:17:54.128Z

The thread goes into more detail. The VAPOR PALACE game may have been released since it looks like a few classifieds were placed for it.

If you know where this game can be found or any leads, please reach out to Adrienne Shaw so we can hopefully track this game down and consider sharing your findings online so we can all help too.

Caper in the Castro thoughts

Developer: C.M. Ralph
Year: 1989
Genre: Adventure
System: Mac

menu screen for caper in the castro showing someone leaning against a lightpole and text saying "It's not just a game, it's a gayme!"

Caper in the Castro is a short point-and-click adventure game created in Hypercard and the earliest known queer game, so I thought it would be fun to check it out during Pride Month. You play as the lesbian detective Tracker McDyke who must find her friend, the drag queen Tessy LaFemme. It’s a very straightforward adventure game where you navigate up and down a street, going into buildings and poking around for clues. Since it was a simple game built in Hypercard, it doesn’t have any inventory items and progress is gated by various notes you take in the game that you will need to use elsewhere. There are death scenes that will force you to restart the game but it’s incredibly quick to get back to where you were before.

game screenshot set outside a bar at night. The bar is titled "The Gayme Room"

I have known about the game for a while but never actually sat down to play through the entire thing and I’m so glad I did. Any flaws the game may have from the lack of depth or the fussy parser, which you briefly use at a few points, was easy for me to overlook because of how charming the game is. I am an absolute sicko for this era of Macintosh games and Hypercard and I loved the art. The game was obviously made at a really dark time and the game encourages people to donate to AIDS charities as a form of paying for the game. I get very emotional seeing people creating queer art during this time and the fact that this was created to be charityware to help others was very moving to me. I was a baby during this time so I also always appreciate any queer art and writing that lets me see what the queer community was doing at this time. The game itself is very campy and messy in a way I really enjoyed (other than the dated language the author apologizes for on the Archive.org page) and I think it would fit in very well with what a lot of experimental queer games that folks are making on Itch.

I’d recommend it, especially if you are interested in queer and/or retro adventure games. It’s not the tightest puzzle design given that the author was working with a limiting tool they didn’t have a ton of experience working with, but I think the art and writing are very charming and it’s an interesting time capsule.

Caper in the Castro is available for free on the Internet Archive and you can repay the author by donating to your LGTBQ+ charity of choice.

What Bands Have Played Myst?

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.

Text Adventures Still Rule in the Year 2026

I think a lot of folks who follow this site already know this but people still make text adventure games like during the days of Infocom and they’re still very good! In fact, I think many of them are even better than the classics. That’s not to say the classics are bad, they’re very good, I just think many made post-golden age of text adventures are even better. You can download many free ones on IFDB.

Some that are friendly to beginners that I happen to enjoy are Lost Pig, Galatea, Bronze, and The Dreamhold, but there’s a nice list of more interactive fiction on IFDB’s top 100 list if you’re looking for more to play. Not all of these are text adventures but I also love interactive fiction in the form of Twine games and other forms so no complaints there. I think the commercial text adventure Thaumistry is a good intro to text adventures as well.

If you want to download these free games instead of playing them in a browser, you’ll probably need something to run the files. I think Gargoyle is neat but there’s plenty of options. Some games are also easier to play if you map out the rooms. Personally I love writing these down in a notebook but Trizbort is a nice app for mapping rooms on your computer. I use a desktop version for Windows but apparently there’s now a browser version available.

If you want to see what else folks are up to in the scene, I recommend exploring the rest of IFDB and checking on competitions like IF Comp and Spring Thing. IF Comp has been going on since the 90s. While I stopped following that one for a while because they allowed AI stuff, it seems like they’re starting to clamp down on it so that’s nice.

Anyway, if you’ve never played a text adventure before, give it a shot! Maybe you’ll discover a new genre of games you really enjoy.

Jetpac Remake by Langford Productions

Developer: Langford Productions
Year: 2026
Genre: Arcade
System: Windows

an astronaut on a planet shooting lasers
Screenshot taken from Itch.io

Ever since I came across the ZX Spectrum game Jetpac as an unlockable in Donkey Kong 64, I’ve been a big fan of it. Maybe it’s a little bit because DK64 itself is not an amazing game but I always loved that there were arcade games you could unlock and play in it like the original Donkey Kong and the ZX Spectrum classic. Since I grew up in the US and was born in the late 80’s, I didn’t really know about the Spectrum until quite a bit later but it’s been fun coming across games from that era that were considered highlights of the platform. Since Jetpac is my favorite, this means I end up playing any remake I come across on Itch.io and I think the new one by Langford Productions is the best I’ve seen yet.

If you haven’t played Jetpac, it’s a very simple arcade game where you’re an astronaut with a jet pack on a planet and must rebuild your rocket by flying around, grabbing parts, and dropping them off at the base of your ship. Once you do that you refuel your ship by grabbing cans of fuel and dropping them off at the ship too. All of this is done while dodging or shooting enemies that bounce around the screen. It’s all very simple but I think the game really holds up. The remake has a lot of additional options you can toggle on and off, which include:

  • Three graphic styles switchable in-game: the original ZX Spectrum, ZX Spectrum limitless colour, and new HD graphics. The new HD graphics are fine, they’re what you kinda expect with any HD remake of an old game. I don’t use them but they’re fine. I don’t really understand the limitless colour thing but it does make Jetpac look like an early 90s VGA DOS game, which I think is neat. Swapping the styles also changes the audio to match the fidelity of what you’re looking at, which I think is a nice touch too.
  • The platforms can randomly re-arrange with each new level
  • Fuel pods can explode when shot.
  • Lunar Jetman missile launcher. I’m less familiar with this one since I never played Lunar Jetman, the second game in the series, and only played the other sequel, Solar Jetman for the NES. But basically you have a missile launcher that stays on the ground and shoots homing missiles at you.
  • Swapping the enemies from the developer’s other ZX Spectrum games Cookie and Pssst. Again, I never played these but it basically gives you more variety by swapping out the original game’s enemies with new ones.

It’s a very nice remake and I’d recommend it if you’re looking for a fun arcade game to play, whether you’ve played the original or not, and then you can check out the other ZX Spectrum remakes by Langford Productions.

The Jetpac remake by Langford Productions is available for Windows on Itch.io.

DREAMM 4.0 is Now Available For Your Lucasarts Needs

The bespoke emulator DREAMM has now reached version 4.0! DREAMM is an emulator focused entirely on games from Lucasfilm Games/Lucasarts. “Why would I use this instead of ScummVM?” you may ask, well, this includes tons of stuff that aren’t adventure games like Jedi Knight, X-Wing, Tie Fighter, and that sort of stuff. It’s also more focused on emulating the games to play how they did at release, with the original menus and not the various other tweaks that ScummVM makes. It’s all by Aaron Giles, who worked at Lucasarts back in the day, doing a lot of porting work, and I guess a modified version of this was used in the recent Rayman release.

The big update this time is support for some late 90s Lucasarts games, all the Lucas Learning stuff, and Monopoly Star Wars and Willow, which I don’t believe were published by Lucasarts but are obviously connected to that world. Monopoly Star Wars is not a great game but I did play it quite a bit at the time. The Lucas Learning stuff is interesting because none of it is available today and DroidWorks, a neat 3D game where you build a droid and walk through levels solving puzzles, has been a massive headache to get working on modern computers for a long time. The other ones in here that I’ve played before are The Gungan Frontier, which is basically a sim game with the Gungans from Episode 1 and Pit Droids, which is kind of a Lemmings/Chu Chu Rocket-like.

Anyway, it’s really neat that this exists and it’s completely free. You can check out all the games it supports here.

A Brief History of Gobliiins

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.

Some Nice Places to Find Abandonware Games

I just realized I had a lot of sources I cycle between for abandonware games and thought it should be something to share, since this is just a blog and not a real games website, and I can post whatever I want. Abandonware, software that is no longer easily available because it is not sold anywhere by the publisher, is frequently a thing in games unfortunately and it doesn’t help that a lot of people just define it as “well this thing is old, so I can put it up for download even if it’s still for sale” which isn’t how preservation works! Anyway, here’s some sites I like that put care into what they upload, update them to work on modern versions of Windows, and take down the downloads if they get rereleased.

The Collection Chamber is the one I look at the most. It’s updated on a monthly basis and has a wide variety of stuff, with a focus on 90s games for Windows that you cannot easily run in DOSBox. It has so many games from the multimedia era that I find fascinating.

Zomb’s Lair has not been updated in a long time but hosts a lot of 90s computer games packaged for modern Windows as well. One of the most interesting ones to me is VNC: Virtual Nightclub, which was apparently an adventure game by the folks that made Burn: Cycle and was sold only through the Sci-Fi Channel phone line, so it was incredibly hard to find anything about it for a long time. I need to do a longer writeup on it sometime. It’s not “good” but it’s a fascinating time capsule of how we viewed the internet and virtual reality at the time.

Mr. Abandonware has organized a collection on the Internet Archive of DOS games packaged to run on modern windows, and it includes a lot of major games. lt’s kind of wild how many games that were commercial and critical hits just aren’t available for sale anywhere.

SentienceSnakes164 has a collection on the Internet Archive as well of games packaged to run on modern versions of Windows. This is more focused on 00s era games, mostly licensed ones that have been pulled from sale, but there’s some oddballs like early Monolith stuff and lesser known FPS like KISS: Psycho Circus.

There’s probably another post in me where I highlight freeware remakes of retro games, but I do want to give a shoutout to this one of Lode Runner: The Mad Monks’ Revenge. This was a game by Sierra that I really liked at the time and this remake adds likes of nice quality of life features.

Finally, MyAbandonware is a fascinating site to watch. It’s just constantly uploading stuff I never heard of. While it’s not focused on updating games to work on modern versions of Windows, they occasionally provide an update. This isn’t a criticism, no one could reasonably update all the games this site uploads.

That’s all I’ve got for this post. Feel free to add others in the comments as long as they aren’t uploading games that are still being sold.