Gobliins 6: More Prince Buffooning After 34 Years!

It finally happened. After 34 years and thanks to the success of 2023’s Gobliiins 5, Pierre Gilhodes released a direct successor to Gobliins 2: The Prince Buffoon, one of the games that heavily influenced how I think and feel about gaming. Just take a look around at this Codex: its gracefully stolen pixel art mostly stems from Gob2. Needless to say, I was stoked when I finally received my Steam key. We knew what to expect: more Adventure Game Studio-esque Gobliins in the same vein as 2023’s Gob5, but this time, with Fingus and Winkle. The question is: did it deliver?

As always, the answer is yes and no. Let’s dive in. First, two warnings: there will be spoilers in screenshots, and my love of Gob2—even though objectively speaking it’s a below-average puzzle adventure game—might have an impact on how I approached Gob6.

Gobliins 6 is to Gobliins 2 what Gobliiins 5 is to the original Gobliiins: instead of controlling three characters which each one designated to do specific tasks and actions, you’ll be controlling the lazy and talkative Fingus (green shirt) and the burly and naughty Winkle (blue hawk-eye). In Gob2, both individuals were often required to execute specific actions in a specific order to solve a particular puzzle. For example, you’ll have to distract someone with Winkle in order to steal a sausage with Fingus. If you loved the interactive between the comical duo, have no fear: that concept is fully present in Gob6.

In fact, it’s a bit too present, if that is even possible. In Gob2, the first thing you do in the first level is distract the two old men guarding an empty bottle with Winkle by trying to steal the sausage of the notable. The notable hits Winkle on the head with the sausage; the old men laugh; and Fingus has a split-second to nab the bottle from them. Mission succeeded. Then you can proceed to the second screen (the house of the wizard) that contains a fountain to fill the bottle.

Here are the differences between both games: in Gob6, you can’t switch scenes. There’s only that one active “level” to tackle which feels a bit constraining. I understand that in Gob5 that was also the case since the original Gob1 didn’t have this. The second difference is a much, much bigger problem. Once you nabbed the bottle, both Fingus and Winkle have access to the shared inventory by right-clicking. Both characters will do different things when trying to interact with an object in the world, and both characters will refuse to pick up certain things, leaving that as a task for the other. Yet the inventory stays simple. In Gob6, each Goblin has their own pockets.

This completely blows up the complexity of the game, especially when the Prince Buffoon joins in the later levels as the third character. In Gob5, Asgard, Ignatius, and Oops all had their own distinct responsibilities to keep the complexity in check when playing with multiple Goblins: with Asgard you whack on stuff, with Ignatius you manipulate the environment with his staff, and with Oops you pick up stuff and talk to folks. In Gob6, both Fingus and Winkle do all these things! This results in endless random attempts that end in a mildly funny animation making clear to the player that they’re doing something wrong—or using the wrong character.

Although I like these silly jokes, they get annoying pretty quickly. In one level, Winkle imitates a chicken if you interact with a certain object. This unskippable animation takes 6 seconds (I counted) and gets old after the third time. The game’s hints that should help newbies get on their way tells the player to simply “combine everything with everything” in case you’re stuck. So I’m supposed to brute-force my way through that has me watch these silly moments over and over again?

To make matters worse, in true Goblins fashion, I never know what the hell I am supposed to do. While Gob6 is a clear effort to improve the storyline into a coherent whole—which is does excellently, I must say—when you’re knee-deep into puzzle solving in a certain level, you often forget tiny but important details. This often resulted in me finding the way forward but one of the Goblins saying something along the lines of “There is something left we have to do.” Okay. What? A little help here?

In Gob2, during each playthrough, you had access to a few “jokers” that are basically step-by-step spoiler guides to help you move forward. In Gob6, you’re going to have to make due with a Steam community guide instead. If you up both the craziness and the amount of “moon logic” puzzles that has me frequently uttering HUH?, why would you leave out such a vital feature? I went back to Gob5 to confirm my suspicions: I found Gob5’s puzzles to be much more bearable.

In fact, I tried to quit playing Gob6 about three times. I even ended up downloading someone else’s savegame but that was because I soft locked myself in level 9. Unfortunately, the game is quite buggy, and some scripts don’t seem to trigger or are not thoroughly tested through. The same can be said for the sloppy English translation, which is just a tad better than Gob5. At least the game can be played in widescreen and you don’t have to start separate .exe files depending on the level. Movement and window pane scrolling still feels choppy. In short: be prepared for many frustrating moments—due to the puzzles and/or due to the bugs.

Too bad though, was these frustrations could easily be tamed if you take a look at what other adventure games are doing:

• Introduce a journal to provide some direction; however small. Having no clue about the purpose besides the major plot is frustrating as well.
• Reintroduce the jokers or a more sophisticated hint system.
• Allow inspection of the garbage you collect along the way. There’s no way to click on these items: for some of them, I didn’t even have the slightest idea what they were supposed to represent.
• Reduce the clutter? This game has a knack of having you pick up a bucket of quicksand because of reasons (otherwise you can’t finish the level but you have no idea why you’re doing so) only to use it four levels later.
• Reduce the pixel hunting. Some later levels contain an unfair amount of them: a small “thingie” to pick up in a dark corner that was simply impossible to spot. Yay.

So why would you want to play Gob6 anyway? To be honest, if you’re not a fan, you shouldn’t. If you are, you will most certainly appreciate the better developed and more clearly visible bond between Winkle and Fingus, the lovely animations, and the endless silly puns. On top of that, Gob6’s soundtrack is actually decent compared to the non-existent background music from the previous Adventure Game Studio-powered Goblins adventure.

The fourth and final time I tried to quit playing this game, I was two levels short of finishing it. That’s all right: it took me 15 years to finish Gob2. A person can only bear that much ridiculous moon logic combined with endless unskippable funny animations as a result of trying to brute-force the puzzles—as per suggestion by the game’s introduction, by the way!

I went back to playing Gobliins 2 before writing all this¹. In Gob2, your (shared) inventory at any given time is limited, as is the average “wrong move, dumbo” silly animation. This is probably also because of 1992 RAM, but this limitation makes the silliness in the older games more bearable compared to the complete overdrive we’re facing here.

Hopefully, the potential Goblins 7 as a direct successor to Goblin’s Quest 3 will be able to contain the craziness. I’ll probably pre-order it as soon as it is announced, although at this point, I have no idea why.