Legend has it that whoever can conquer the dreaded Labyrinth of Foliandre will bring peace and prosperity to the land. For several millennia, two kingdoms, ruled by Queen Xina and King Bodd, have competed in this struggle, but none have emerged victorious. However, the guardian of the Labyrinth has recently passed away, and his daughter Wynonna has mysteriously gone missing. All of this drama makes for fantastic reading, and so an intrepid reporter named Blount takes off to the skies to interview the two monarchs, find (and fall in love with) the missing lady, and maybe solve the mystery of the Labyrinth himself.

This chessboard puzzle is as infuriating as it looks.

Goblins Quest 3 is quite similar to the second game, although various elements have been refined even further. For starters, while you still control two characters at once, one of them is designated the "main" character, while the other is the "secondary". Only the main character can use items, which more clearly delineates the roles between the two, and thus makes the puzzle solving a little less haphazard. Throughout most of the game, the hero is Blount, although the view occasionally shifts to other characters like the gorgeous (for a goblin) Wynonna. The secondary characters also alternate throughout the game – these include a bosseyed parrot named Chump, a magician named Ooya and a snake named Fulbert. At one point, Blount is bitten by a werewolf, which gives him the power to transform whenever the full moon comes out. In many screens there's also a huge size differential between Blount and the kingdom's denizens, so often you'll need to change sizes to more properly navigate your surroundings. Like Gobliins 2, the puzzles can occasionally span multiple areas, although now they've expanded to larger areas which scroll horizontally. The Joker hint function has returned, as well as a "Point of Screen" option, which will spell out the goal without giving any explicit hints. There's also a "Newspaper" column screen, which will summarize the events of the plot so far. Although storytelling still isn't the game's focus, this does manage to make the game slightly more engrossing, and the rotating cast of characters keeps things fresh. So fundamentally Goblins Quest 3 isn't a whole lot different from its predecessor – the puzzles are similar, and are just as difficult – but these fixes remove most of the more annoying factors of the previous games, making it easily the most playable of the series.

In a neat little touch, characters still converse in a gibberish language, but the actual speech isn't translated like in the other games. Instead, after talking, Blount simply faces the screen and delivers a quick recap of what was just discussed. It's a cool way to integrate the player into the narrative, making them feel lost by not understanding what's going on, and having the protagonist explain it to them.

After Goblins Quest 3, Coktel Vision went on to make The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, and while the artwork looks very similar – obviously still the work of Pierre Gilhodes – it's more of a traditional adventure game. Coktel ended up getting shuttered not long after, leaving Gilhodes to work on comics and other projects. It wasn't until 2009 that he got together with French developer Société Pollene and Russian producer Snowberry Connection to create the latest installment in the series.

As the three "i"s in the title suggests, Gobliiins 4 puts you control of three characters at once, each with the same abilities as the first game – Tchoup is the item handler, Perluis is the magician, and Stucco is the brawn. Their goal is to save the king's anteater, Riri, who has mysteriously gone missing.

The whole thing is a throwback in more ways than one, as it once again focuses the action on a single screen, and the plot is relegated solely to inter-level briefings. It even brings back the passwords, although at least it keeps a saved profile that lets you automatically access the most recent level. It's a bit odd, seeing that most of the changes that went into the second and third game were undoubtedly for the better, making this initially feel like a step back. But the interface has been much improved, allowing multiple goblins to move at once. And most importantly, the life bar is gone, removing the absolute biggest stumbling block of the original.

The style of puzzles is more or less the same as before, of course. The solutions are not always difficult but are still absurd. Right on the first screen, Tchoup refuses to leave his house until you feed his plant, which happens to be a vegetarian. Simply feeding him pickles from the pickle jar isn't enough – you need to look at the portrait on the wall to learn that Tchoup's cousin is a carrot farmer, then write a letter to him to have a carrot delivered to your room, allowing you to properly feed your plant and move on. It's all pretty easy to figure out, given what you're told, but the developers still haven't realized that this kind of bizarre adventure game logic actually frustrates the player more than actually making them laugh, which was probably the intention.

The computer rendered visuals are easily as wacky as the earlier games.

The fifteen year gap between the third and fourth game obviously saw drastic improvement in technology, so Gobliiins 4 is much more advanced graphically. The goblins themselves are now 3D models, while the backgrounds are computer rendered 2D bitmaps. It's certainly nothing fancy – it rather looks like something that could've been made ten years earlier – and the huge bulging googly eyes of the goblins may elicit too many bad memories of Nintendo 64- era Rare games like Banjo-Kazooie. But it's held together by its excellent character animations, one of the hallmarks of the older games, which always managed to elicit smiles in spite of their freakishness. The added depth of the backgrounds makes for some more interesting level designs, playing with perspective in the ways the original games couldn't. They've always been a bit trippy, but Gobliiins 4 goes even more overboard – Riri's room is a hyper colorful asylum that seems sprung from a clown's nightmare, one of the shrines has a gigantic leg springing out of the top (with several smaller legs surrounding the entrance) and the final stage sends the heroes rocketing into space to fight against a terrifying alien. There's also a running subquest to find a set of golden teeth, of which one is hidden in every stage. Properly discovering all of them will unlock a secret level where the goblins escape from the computer screen and out into the real world to have a chat with their creator. There are sixteen screens total, including the secret one.

Gobliiins 4 is something of a weird beast. It ignores most of the advances introduced in the second and third games, and so in that way it feels less progressive, but at the same time improves on the formula with better, more focused puzzle design. Still, it's definitely made for fans nostalgic for the first entry, leaving everyone else just as confused and baffled as before.