The entire Gobliiins series just dropped on consoles

Red Art Games released the Gobliiins Collection digitally on May 27 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch. The launch puts the entire five-game puzzle-adventure series on consoles for the very first time.

The promotional trailer uses a grating AI voiceover. It is a baffling marketing choice that actively makes the ad harder to watch. Fortunately, the actual games are entirely human-made and have a long history behind them.

Thirty years of weird puzzles

The series started in 1991 on the Amiga, Atari ST, and MS-DOS. French developer Coktel Vision and artist Pierre Gilhodes built the games around a specific gimmick. You control a team of goblins, each with a rigid set of abilities, and you have to combine their skills to solve single-screen puzzles. One goblin might be the only one who can pick up items, while another specializes in punching things or casting magic.

The puzzles themselves run entirely on cartoon logic. You rarely solve a problem by doing something practical. Instead, you usually have to figure out the exact sequence of absurd actions required to trigger a chain reaction. Hitting a specific rock might cause a creature to drop an item, but only if your second goblin is standing in the exact right spot to catch it. The trial-and-error approach is a core part of the experience, mostly because guessing wrong triggers slapstick failure animations.

The naming convention is a joke that explains the mechanics. The number of 'i's in the title originally matched the number of characters you controlled. The 1991 original has three 'i's for its trio of heroes (Oups, Asgard, and Ignatius) who are trying to cure King Angoulafre's sudden insanity. The 1992 sequel, Gobliins 2: The Prince Buffoon, drops down to two protagonists. Goblins 3 followed in 1993. You play as a single character named Blount, an eccentric reporter who gets caught in a war over a magical labyrinth.

The collection includes those first three games, plus the two modern revivals. Gobliiins 4 jumped to 3D in 2009. The visual shift was jarring, and the game received a very mixed reception from players who preferred the detailed pixel art of the 1990s. The series then went dormant for over a decade before Gilhodes returned with Gobliiins 5: The Morgloton Invasion in 2023. That fifth game went back to the original 2D art style and the three-character setup. The plot involves trying to stop a mysterious epidemic that turns everyone into potatoes.

The physical edition

Digital copies are available now, but Red Art Games is also producing a physical release exclusively for the PlayStation 5. The physical version is scheduled to ship on September 24.

The Collector's Edition leans heavily into PC nostalgia. It ships in a retro big box and includes a replica floppy disk, a physical booklet, and a postcard signed by Gilhodes. The standard physical edition just includes the game disc.

The software itself wraps the five games with a few modern extras. The package includes multiple versions of the first three games. This likely covers the different audio and visual quirks between the Amiga and DOS releases. There is also a music player and a video interview with Gilhodes about the origins of the series.

It is strange that a franchise so deeply rooted in home computer history skipped a PC release for this specific collection. The individual games are mostly available on Steam and GOG already, but PC players miss out on the unified launcher and the bonus interview. Console players, meanwhile, finally get to see King Angoulafre lose his mind.