Emmanuelle (Coktel Vision) - 1989

This review is part of the “Let’s Adventure!” series. See all reviewed games sorted by rating here.

Emmanuelle is an erotic graphical adventure game from Coktel Vision, originally released in 1989 for Amiga, Atari ST, and MS-DOS. The game was developed by Muriel Tramis (better known from her games in the Gobliiins series, Fascination & Lost in Time) and is loosely inspired by Emmanuelle Arsan’s emmanuelle series of novels.

Everyone’s DTF … you just gotta say the right thing

I’m gonna be honest here … I had no idea what was going on, what I was supposed to be doing, where I was supposed to go, why I was going there, what these random “Idols” were or … anything. This game is really fucking confusing and if the walkthrough didn’t fit on a single page (no scrolling) I’d likely have ignored this title altogether.

Copy protection is possibly the most intuitive part of this game

You start off by having to lookup a couple of colour values from a massive table. This is the game’s copy protection and only lasts a few seconds, but may be the most fun part of the game :P

EGA nudity … how “hot”

The interface is unintuitive and the goal of the game is unclear. It’s possibly covered in the manual (I didn’t go looking for it) but apparently you’re trying to find “Emmanuelle”, and you need to get 75 or more “eroticism” points to make this happen. These points are added by hooking up with random women, which you do by choosing the right options from a dialogue tree.

When you’re trying to choose a dialogue option they cycle by extremely quickly, which makes it hard to pick the right one. This may be an artifact of running the game in DOSBox (I could lower the CPU speed, but didn’t) but just in case the original game sucked just as badly on original hardware I figured it was worth calling out.

CORRECTION: Turns out this is actually VERY MUCH due to running the game in DOSBox. I tried the Atari ST version using Steem SSE and the timing was not an issue. Also it appears the palette is only complete garbage when playing this game in DOS. When you play this game in an Atari ST emulator the 16 colors actually look pretty good as opposed to the baby vomit that the DOS colors seem to default to.

I still wouldn’t recommend playing the game, but if you have to - do it on an Atari ST

There are a half dozen cities you need to visit and each one has an airport you can buy tickets from. The amount of money you have is limited and if you run out it’s game over.

You find Emmanuelle at the airport and leave … EXIT TO DOS

This game just makes no sense. Maybe if you’ve read the books this is loosely based on you’ll have some idea as to where to go but from the moment you get “control”, locations on the maps aren’t highlighted in any way so you’re guessing where to click to interact with the game world. What you’re supposed to do on each screen makes no sense. Why I had to buy a toucan at one point made no sense.

Nothing about this game made any sense. If it made sense to YOU, please explain in the comments below :)

Game Information

Game	Emmanuelle
Developer	Coktel Vision
Publisher	Tomahawk, Coktel Vision
Release Date	1989
Systems	DOS, Amiga, Atari ST

My Playthrough

How Long to Beat?	1 hour
Version Played	DOS via DOSBox-X
Notes	Walkthrough

Score

See here for a refresher on how we’re scoring these games.

Atmosphere (20)	3
Story (25)	3
Experience (15)	2
Impact (10)	1
	13%

Gallery