The bizarre 90s puzzle series Gobliiins just got a console collection

Red Art Games just released the Gobliiins Collection for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and Nintendo Switch. The digital versions are available right now, and physical editions are scheduled for September.

The Gobliiins series is a weird piece of point-and-click history from the early 90s European PC scene. Originally developed by French studio Coktel Vision for platforms like the Amiga, Atari ST, and MS-DOS, the games mix traditional adventure logic with character swapping. You control a specific number of goblins to solve puzzles, and the spelling of the title actually tells you how many characters you get to manage.

In the original 1991 Gobliiins, you juggle three characters to save a king who has lost his mind. One goblin casts erratic magic spells, another picks up and uses items, and the third just punches things really hard. You have to combine their specific skills to clear single-screen puzzles. Gobliins 2: The Prince Buffoon drops the roster down to two characters, while Goblins Quest 3 focuses primarily on a single goblin journalist named Blount.

The new collection packs in the first five games. That covers the original 1991 to 1993 2D trilogy, the 2009 jump to 3D with Gobliiins 4, and the 2023 return to 2D in Gobliiins 5. The fourth game is a particularly strange artifact. It maps the series' traditional puzzle mechanics onto chunky polygonal graphics before the developer eventually retreated back to hand-drawn art for the fifth entry.

Big boxes and rigid floppies

Red Art Games is leaning heavily into retro PC nostalgia for the physical releases. The PlayStation 5 Collector's Box comes packaged like a classic PC game from the era. Inside the oversized box, you get a dedicated booklet, a postcard signed by series creator and artist Pierre Gilhodes, and a floppy disk. The publisher clarifies that the floppy is "rigid," so do not expect to actually boot it up in an old disk drive.

The software itself includes a few extras beyond the games. Players get access to a music player, an art gallery, and 3D models of the original PC game boxes. There is also an exclusive video interview with Gilhodes about the history of the series and his design philosophy. His strange, slightly grotesque art style is the main reason people still remember these games, so having his commentary included makes sense.

These games are notoriously difficult. They rely heavily on the kind of trial-and-error moon logic that defined the early 90s adventure genre. You will often find yourself clicking every object on the screen just to see what kind of slapstick animation plays out. But having the entire saga in one place makes that old frustration a lot more approachable today. You can grab the digital version on modern consoles now, or pre-order the big box from the Red Art Games website. It beats digging out an old Amiga or fighting with DOSBox configurations just to watch a goblin get hit in the head with an anvil.