Coktel Vision games

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Coktel Vision was a French studio and one of the most distinctive voices in European adventure design. Its games are recognisable above all by their art — warped, hand-drawn worlds full of odd creatures that look more like book illustrations than computer graphics.

The best known is the Gobliiins series. Its idea is simple and clever: you control several characters, each able to do something different, and the puzzle is working out who to use, on what, and in which order. Nothing can be solved by a single hero. Around that sits a completely idiosyncratic sense of humour — the games are full of small animals, absurd noises and situations that make no sense until they happen.

Coktel managed a more serious register too. Inca is a strange hybrid of space shooter and historical adventure, Ween: The Prophecy a classic fantasy adventure with beautifully painted screens, and Lost in Time a time-travel story with filmed sequences. Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth is then one of the strangest games of the entire nineties — a post-apocalyptic world with a language and a logic of its own, where you are never quite sure you understand what is happening.

A large part of the company's output was educational software for children, which was enormously widespread in France; a generation of French children knew those titles from the family computer.

Technically Coktel got by with an in-house engine used across almost its entire output. As a result its games control similarly and share a rhythm — slower, more descriptive, and more interested in having you look at the screen than in pushing you onward. By modern standards that takes patience, but the reward is an atmosphere you will not find anywhere else.