From 1991 to today: how Gobliins 6 brings back classic point-and-click fun

For many players, the early ’90s adventure-game boom is remembered through grand pirate epics and sprawling fantasy worlds. But tucked somewhere between those classics was a wonderfully strange little series starring goblins who solved problems in ways that made perfect sense—provided you were willing to accept cartoon logic. More than three decades after the original debut, designer Pierre Gilhodes has returned with Gobliins 6: The Prince Buffoon – The Madmen of the Year 1000, proving that absurdity, when carefully crafted, never really goes out of style. At first glance, Gobliiins 6 looks almost defiantly retro. The hand-drawn pixel art, compact puzzle screens, and playful animations feel like they were teleported straight from a 1993 floppy disk—only sharper, smoother, and a little less likely to require shouting at your computer. The game once again follows two goblin heroes, Fingus and Winkle, who must cooperate to solve a series of increasingly bizarre challenges in order to rescue the perpetually unlucky Prince Buffoon. If the name sounds familiar, that’s because rescuing him has basically become their full-time job. At this point, someone should really consider hiring a better palace security team.

The core gameplay remains faithful to the series’ roots: each character has unique abilities, and success depends on switching between them at the right moment, combining items creatively, and occasionally trying solutions that feel completely ridiculous—because in Gobliins, the ridiculous solution is often the correct one. Need to distract a guard? Sure, try a clever disguise… or smack something loudly with a hammer and see what happens. It’s puzzle design that rewards curiosity and experimentation rather than rigid logic, a refreshing contrast to modern games that insist on explaining every mechanic three times before letting you play. The arrival of Gobliins 6 also serves as a reminder of how unusual the series has always been. When the original Gobliins launched in 1991, adventure games were increasingly focused on dialogue trees and narrative storytelling. Gilhodes and his collaborators instead created something closer to an interactive cartoon: minimal text, expressive animations, slapstick humor, and puzzles built around visual gags. Even the series’ unusual title spelling was a playful mechanic—the number of “i” letters indicated how many goblins you controlled. It was a small joke baked right into the logo, and somehow that tells you everything about the franchise’s personality.

Over the years, the series quietly built a cult following. While it never dominated the mainstream the way some adventure franchises did, it remained beloved by players who appreciated its playful creativity and refusal to take itself seriously. That spirit continues in the newest installment, which feels less like a modern reboot and more like opening a long-lost sequel that somehow arrived exactly as fans remember it—only now it runs without needing DOS commands and a great deal of patience. What makes Gobliins 6 particularly charming is its confidence. It doesn’t try to reinvent the adventure genre, chase cinematic realism, or stretch itself into a hundred-hour open world. Instead, it offers carefully designed puzzle scenes, whimsical storytelling, and humor that ranges from clever to delightfully silly.

Some puzzles will make you feel brilliant; others will make you stare at the screen wondering why giving a goblin a fish somehow fixed a mechanical problem—but that confusion is part of the fun. After all, if adventure games never made you say, “Well… I guess that worked,” were they really adventure games? In a gaming landscape dominated by enormous productions and endless live-service updates, Gobliins 6 feels refreshingly personal: a handcrafted continuation of a quirky creative vision that began more than thirty years ago. It’s nostalgic without being stuck in the past, playful without being shallow, and—perhaps most importantly—it remembers that games are allowed to be a little weird. And honestly, the industry could probably use more goblins solving problems in completely unreasonable ways.

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