Here’s a riddle for your retro-brain: what do you get when two slap-stick goblins, one kidnapped heir nick-named “Prince Buffoon,” and an inventory item literally labelled “pepper” collide inside a point-and-click puzzler that refuses to obey the laws of sensible interface design? (Rhetorical aside; self-owning answer: your mouse mat starts to smell like sizzling grey matter.) Gobliins 2 – The Prince Buffoon lands squarely between anarchic fever dream and quietly essential adventure classic, underrated in North America, loudly adored in French Amiga circles, and perpetually indispensable to anyone who thought LucasArts’ clowning needed a dash more Gallic weird. Dropping on European PCs in late 1992 courtesy of Coktel Vision and crossing the Atlantic under Sierra’s banner in February 1993, the sequel ditched the first game’s trio of pint-sized heroes for a tighter buddy comedy, doubled down on cartoon cruelty, and seasoned everything with enough spice (yes, that pepper jar becomes a running gag) to out-flavour an entire MasterChef finale. Fundamental to the genre? Maybe not if you judge purely by sales charts, yet try prying its DNA out of later oddball favourites like The Neverhood and tell me it’s negligible.
Historical Context
In 1992 Coktel Vision looked less like a software studio and more like a Franco-Belgian animation house that had accidentally installed Turbo C on its light-tables. Their earlier hit, Gobliiins (note the triple-I flex), had introduced PC owners to artist Pierre Gilhodes’ bulbous noses, rubber-hose limbs, and puzzles that punished sloppy clicks with electric shocks. Sierra, keen to brighten an adventure line-up sliding toward noir detectives and courtroom dramas, licensed the sequel for English-speaking shores. Cue box art splashed with Looney-Tunes colours and a tagline that boasted “twice the laughs, half the goblins,” an algebra accountants found hilarious.
Europe at the time was deep in point-and-click mania: Monkey Island 2 jokes were playground currency, Day of the Tentacle teasers hogged cover-disks, and British shareware teams pumped out every Myst-lite they could compile before tea break. Coktel’s games, though, felt defiantly continental, cut-scene art swerved toward Moebius doodles on a sugar rush, MIDI tracks winked at cafe-concert accordions, and onomatopoeic speech balloons erupted like Tintin but with more slap. I first saw Gobliins 2 at a computer-fair kiosk where a demo looped the opening scene, demon Amoniak swaggering into King Angoulafre’s throne room, every ninety seconds. By day’s end the floor was littered with paper cups and pencilled passwords: proof a puzzle game could reduce grown tech journalists to note-passing schoolchildren.
Timing helped. Sierra’s own releases that winter skewed serious, Gabriel Knight brewed voodoo doom, Police Quest: Open Season preached procedure, so a colour-splattered fairy-tale about blue-skinned goblins arrived as palette cleanser. Even LucasArts, for all its silliness, rarely leaned into pure visual slap-stick; Coktel did so with abandon. Meanwhile console owners were reveling in The Lost Vikings, another multi-character head-scratcher; PC evangelists seized on the kinship, crowning Gobliins 2 the sophisticated European cousin of Midgard’s cartoon Norsemen.
Crucially, the North-American DOS build landed months before CD-ROM hype convinced marketing execs that grainy FMV was the future. Hand-drawn VGA panels still turned heads, and Gobliins 2’s screen-filling sprites, rendered in Gilhodes’ “eggplant caricature” style, looked artisanal next to digitised ghost actors shuffling through The 7th Guest.
Mechanics
Launch the game and an orchestral riff erupts that sounds like Ren & Stimpy interpreting Offenbach. Two protagonists instantly jostle for screen time: Fingus, red-haired, polite, prone to shrugging when plans implode, and Winkle, blue-skinned, irrepressible, the sort of goblin who pokes a sleeping ogre for giggles. Death is gone; unlike the original’s shared health meter, no pratfall here costs progress. Instead the designers weaponise timing. You can queue a gesture for Fingus, hot-swap to Winkle before the first animation ends, and craft Rube-Goldberg mayhem in real time.
Enter the infamous “Chicken-Pepper” episode. In a giant’s pantry sit a jittery rooster, a string of sausage, and a conspicuous pepper mill. In classic Coktel fashion, Winkle tries to ride the chicken (cue feather cyclone), Fingus politely rubs sausage under its beak, the rooster pops out an egg at ballistic velocity, and a well-timed sprinkle of pepper provokes a sneeze so violent it topples a cauldron, cooling molten soup you’ll later cross. It’s logic in the sense that Looney Tunes is physics.
That pepper jar becomes the absurd thread sewing the whole adventure together: you’ll spice a troll’s lunch to earn bridge passage, tickle a sentient totem, even make demon Amoniak hack and wheeze long enough to snag a key item. By the tenth callback, the gag evolves into a meta wink, Coktel whispering, “Yes, we know this is ridiculous; run with it.”
Interface purists may twitch at the single-click verb system, but here’s the skinny: left-click interacts, and a right-click pops open a mini-palette where you select hand, talk, or inventory icons. It isn’t a SCUMM-style verb “cycle”; it’s a radial burst that pauses time long enough to spare your mouse hand repetitive strain. Crucially, identical commands executed by each goblin often diverge. Ask Fingus to greet bare electrical wires and he scratches his head; ask Winkle and he sparks himself into a frizzy lightbulb. These divergent reactions become half the solution space, effectively doubling the designers’ toolkit for puzzle punchlines.
Levels now sprawl across several horizontally scrolling screens, far broader than the single-panel stages of Gobliiins. That expansion forces memory gymnastics: leave pepper on screen A, realise you need it two scenes later, and backtrack while recalling which goblin stashed what. Each goblin’s pocket is personal unless you perform a literal hand-over animation, a quirk responsible for my most humbling moment: half an hour hunting a “missing” crank only to discover Winkle had stuffed it away off-screen.
Failure never equals reload; wrong solutions trigger gag loops instead. Touch a live wire? Temporary afro. Feed the wrong mushroom to a gnome chef? He inflates like a parade float, conveniently forming a platform. This “no fatal state” philosophy invites reckless trying. It pre-echoes the “fail forward” spirit later beloved in Overcooked, Untitled Goose Game, and other modern chaos sims.
Audio is part circus, part carnival ride: accordion riffs, chipmunk goblin gibberish, and a CD version that layers digitised squeaks over MIDI. Computer Gaming World’s August 1993 review praised its “sharp-witted entertainment and enhanced ease of use,” side-stepping any comment on how quickly the soundtrack bores into your frontal lobe like a cartoon dentist.
If LucasArts perfected “puzzles as story beats,” Coktel championed “puzzles as slap-stick sketches.” Each area plays like a micro vaudeville routine: setup (collect pepper), timing (hand sausage exactly as chicken inhales), payoff (egg torpedoes pot). Complexity peaks in Amoniak’s labyrinth, where rooms interlock Escher-style and simultaneous goblin antics echo a cooperative platformer years before Portal 2 or It Takes Two.
Legacy and Influence
Coktel Vision never rivalled LucasArts at the cash register, but Gobliins 2 sold well enough to bankroll Goblins Quest 3 and, so rumour says, several celebratory cases of Bordeaux. French and German magazines splashed 80-plus scores; CU Amiga famously snarked a brutal 40 percent, complaining the humour “left them cold.” Regardless, fan communities flourished. ScummVM added support early, keeping the game one click away on modern OSes, and speedrunners now weaponise simultaneous commands, skipping animations in ways the coders never foresaw.
Mechanically, its dual-avatar DNA shows up everywhere: The Cave, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, even comedic co-op hits like Overcooked draw on the idea of personality-driven actions and timing chaos. Art director Gilhodes recycled his bulbous aesthetic in Coktel’s later surrealist gem Woodruff and the Schnibble, proof the style outlived floppy disks. Ask modern indie devs why they risk “moon-logic” puzzles and many point to Gobliins 2: if pepper can topple giants, any item is fair game.
So why remain niche? Part translation, the Franco-Belgian pun density confounded English speakers. Part marketing, Sierra pushed it with a few magazine ads and called it a day. Mostly, though, Gobliins 2 is happily obtuse. Either you giggle at infinite pratfalls, or you uninstall after the tenth sneeze gag. Those who click, though, never forget. Mention the game in retro forums and watch veterans mime frantic mouse-twitch poses: “Dude, I nailed the bat-ride lever pull first try!” In pre-YouTube days these anecdotes spread like contraband cheat codes, scribbled in school notebooks alongside doodles of pepper mills.
Modern re-evaluation has been kind. DOSBox smooths performance, ScummVM fixes cursor lag, and streamers mine endless reaction-cam gold from the goblins’ slap-stick loops. Even the soundtrack enjoys meme life: sped-up goblin babble remixes haunt TikTok under #RetroFrenchFunk. Pepper emojis optional.
Closing Paragraph + Score
Is Gobliins 2 – The Prince Buffoon a timeless landmark or a spicy side dish that only retro die-hards should taste? The truth curls somewhere in between. Its determination never to kill the player renders it a friendly gateway into early-’90s adventures, even as its pepper-propelled logic tests your patience. Yet boot it today and I defy you not to grin when Fingus bows politely to a dragon only for Winkle to wallop the same beast with a fish, triggering a puzzle solution so counter-intuitive it circles back to genius. Three decades on, Coktel’s technicolour labyrinth feels fresh precisely because no one else would dare build something this gleefully anarchic. My whistle? 8.1 / 10, subtract a notch for interface kinks, add a full point for transforming pantry seasoning into a design cornerstone. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need digital pepper; there’s a demon with a stubborn case of the sniffles.