Adventure Gamers - Forums

edit 2: The game is out! Grab it at
https://pierre-gilhodes.itch.io/gobliiins5

edit: Now live on Kickstarter!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pierregilhodes/gobliiins5-pc

It is really happening! Behind all this Syberia 4, Monkey Island 3.0 and Simon the Sorcerer 0 news we completely missed this game.

Pierre Gilhodes, French artist, animator and creator of the beloved Gobliiins 1-3, Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth and not-so-beloved Gobliiins 4, returns with the 5th Gobliiins installment which was crowdfunded way back in March at the French Ulule website. Here’s a link to the campaign. And here’s the trailer (also watch other cartoons on that channel drawn by Gilhodes):

As some of you may remember, Gobliiins 4 came out some 15 years ago, solely developed by Gildhodes and “updated” to 3D which, in all honesty, looked pretty terrible. This time Pierre decided to create the game oldschool-style using AGS (Adventure Game Studio, the free programming tool you should all be familiar with), with a 640x480 resolution and 2D graphics filled with rich animations. Once again we will play as three goblins with different abilities: a warrior, a wizard and a thief an adventurer. Once again they have to save their poor king from some mad scientist who turned him into a potato as it seems. Both the plot and the surroundings will be as weird as ever. Here’s another short trailer with another “location” (a huge snail):

Already in the trailers and posters I can spot some familiar locations and characters from earlier games: a flying ship along with the coward captain (Gob3), a hippie tree (Gob2) and, of course, the king himself. The potato scientist looks suspiciously like BigWig, the arch-villain from Woodruff:

Unfortunately there is no information whether Muriel Tramis, “the French Roberta Williams” who co-created all the games (except for Gobliiins 4) with Gilhodes, is involved. The forth game also suffered from some poor puzzle design in addition to poor 3D. Now that one problem is solved, I hope she will be brought on board too, or at least help with useful advise.

Great news! Wow, what a year for adventure games.

And I probably won’t receive many likes for this but besides the graphics, I thought G4 was an improvement on G3. It’s just not Gobliiins with only one playable character. G2 is my favorite though.

Charophycean - 19 May 2022 10:28 PM

And I probably won’t receive many likes for this but besides the graphics, I thought G4 was an improvement on G3. It’s just not Gobliiins with only one playable character. G2 is my favorite though.

There was always someone to accompany the protagonist of Gob3 - a parrot, a snake, a reflection, etc. Felt more like Sam & Max than two goblins, but I still adore the inventiveness of that game. The original Gobliiins, on the other hand, was a rather traumatising experience for me as a child - I literally had nightmares with walking skeletons, demon dogs and fried feet, and you could never tell what horrible fate awaited the magician as he cast a spell))

a perfect release for touch screens

I bet this is going to be great. I’m so in the nood for some Gobl<<i>>ns right now.

Slightly off topic—what’s the easiest way to play Woodruff and the Schnibble

Baron_Blubba - 20 May 2022 12:22 PM

Slightly off topic—what’s the easiest way to play Woodruff and the Schnibble

there isn’t , you either give in to the character’s slow movement or kick your device ass.

the only thing i can tell, really, is don’t be ashamed to refer to walkthroughs

Yeah, my question was phrased too ambiguously; I thought this might happen.
What I meant was: What’s the easiest way to get Woodruff downloaded and running on a computer these days? Last I checked, it was not available through Steam or GOG.

Advie - 20 May 2022 02:03 PM

there isn’t , you either give in to the character’s slow movement or kick your device ass.

the only thing i can tell, really, is don’t be ashamed to refer to walkthroughs

It’s not even the movements which are slow, it’s the size of locations which are often huge, interconnected, with multiple exits. In fact this is the major difference: unlike the linear Goblins which you solve screen by screen, Woodruff is open-world. There is even a map (also ludicrously big), only it is given when you are like 2/3 through the game - which is cruel, in a French way. I was hoping they would fix it in ScummVM or a fan patch, but alas.

And then there are puzzles which follow not only the cartoon logic, but also the logic of this world, and they vary greatly - from inventory puzzles to spells (which you must first create using the local oddly sounding syllables), to money gambling, to “superpowers” which you must gather at one point, to weather forecasting puzzles, as well as lots of mad puzzles that deal with bureaucracy. The game is not impossible - I solved most of it on my first playthrough, but it is not for the faint of heart.

Baron_Blubba - 20 May 2022 04:43 PM

Yeah, my question was phrased too ambiguously; I thought this might happen.
What I meant was: What’s the easiest way to get Woodruff downloaded and running on a computer these days? Last I checked, it was not available through Steam or GOG.

Oh, it’s not on GOG yet? Shame on them. I did a quick search, and it seems like there are copies on ebay and Amazon. And I think it runs fine on ScummVM, just like other Sierra/Coktel games.

Backed. I got a lot of fun out of the earlier Goblins games and this shouldn’t be an exception.

It’s interesting how much the designers of Kickstarters ask. Goblins 5 asks for 3000 EUR while Perfect Tides 2 (which I also backed) asks for 80,000 EUR. If anything Goblins 5 is the graphically superior game, and neither has voice acting. Why the discrepancy?