Bargon Attack (Coktel Vision) - 1992

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

Bargon Attack is an adventure game, originally released in Spain and France in 1992. The cyberpunk game uses stylized art presented in a 2.5D format.

Bargon Attack is one of the less known adventures from Coktel Vision, though it was one of the first that introduced the unique interface that was used in many Coktel games that followed. It was also one of the first of Coktel’s games to use FMV technology in cut-scenes.

The gameplay is a mix of science fiction, cyberpunk and comedy elements. It takes place in the near future when an alien race named Bargon conquered the Earth and enslaved its people. You take a role of the young programmer who decides to put an end to the cruel aliens. You’ll travel through 20 or so locations. Each one consists of 1 to 3 screens, similar to other Coktel games.

Along your travels, you’ll face dangerous creatures and some strange alien technology. There are some occasions when you can die (though the option to replay the level is always available), plus the game also features several arcade sequences.¹

The game starts off with some good ol’ fashion copy protection. I assumed ScummVM would allow me to bypass this, but if you happen to play an original copy in DOSBox or something else, the scans for these colour charts aren’t hard to find.

Once you get past the copy protection you get into the main game, which is a fairly generic point and click adventure. Moving the cursor around the screen will call out areas you can interact with, and click on those will execute the associated action.

Unlike most adventure games, there are only a couple of verbs available, and they tend to just be to “look” at whatever is highlighted, or to pick it up if that’s an option.

Picking up items will change the cursor to represent the item you just picked up, but you typically can’t use it right away so you need to right click to get your original cursor back. This was a bit cumbersome and unintuitive at first, but once you realize that’s how you’re supposed to play this game it wasn’t that big of a deal.

The purpose of the game seems to be to follow this hooded guy around that you witnessed killing someone. It turns out that he’s from Bargon (and is a Bargonian?) and through people playing the game Bargon Attack, humans have somehow allowed Bargon … to Attack.

I really didn’t follow the plot at all, but there’s a computer at the end you need to put a disk into that for some reason or another will save the Earth.

There aren’t a lot of items you need to pick up and use throughout the game, but the arm unit you get early on is actually sort of an interesting tool. You can pick up various “disks” throughout the game that give the arm unit different abilities, which can help you solve puzzles or give you clues as to what to do next.

The programs these disks contain are “shoot”, which lets you fire a beam at something (usually an enemy). A “mutate” program allows you to transform what you aim at, and “translate” can be used to decipher Bargonian text or speech.

You’ll use the arm unit quite a bit as it’s the main way to advance through the game. The other way to advance through the game is with a walkthrough as a lot of the puzzles just aren’t that well designed and it’s very easy to get yourself killed.

Get used to this screen - it’s the only one you see when you mess up

Every time you die - which will happen a lot - you get the exact same Game Over screen. Thankfully the game allows you to just return to the same screen you just died on to try again, so if you forgot to save for a while you typically won’t lose much progress.

Make sure you write this pattern down …

It’s really not all that obvious what you’re supposed to be doing at any time during this game. Though you’ll meet a couple characters here and there, there’s no dialogue or interaction to speak of so those characters are no different than any other static asset in the game.

The story will progress via the cutscenes as you advance from section to section, but the story also doesn’t really make all that much sense - though they’re clearly trying to make it seem like there is one.

Oh goody, a filler arcade sequence

To break up the monotony (I guess) there is an arcade sequence early on … assuming you are able to make your way into the water. There’s absolutely no reason for this sequence to exist other than to kill time, so you need to mash your way through a bunch of crab things before they take away enough of your “health” to trigger another Game Over.

Though there is absolutely no background music, and the sound effects are annoying at best - the game’s visuals are extremely well done. There really isn’t much to do on each screen you visit, but they are nice to look at.

Since there’s little to no dialogue in the game, plot progression occurs through cutscenes that happen between each game section. You’ll learn that the Earth is destroyed and you have to go to Bargon to put some program in their super computer.

If you do this you save (restore?) the planet - which ends up being your ultimate goal in the game. After a handful of unintuitive puzzles on Bargon you’ll find the computer, make your way up an elevator and put the disk in drive #3 (you do get a clue about this earlier at least).

Yay, the game is over! I’m not a fan of Coktel Vision games, and so far in this review series some of the lowest scores belong to their titles. Bargon Attack is the best of these games so far, but that’s not saying much.

The intro in the version I played was at least voice acted, so that was a nice touch as this game is mostly devoid of sound. There is no background music at any point throughout the game, and the annoying sound effects that you get occasionally don’t really improve the experience.

The game really isn’t fun, the story isn’t compelling and the experience is lackluster at best. I was hoping to find something interesting to support this review, but I couldn’t. If you happen to be a fan of this game though, check out the reviews at The Adventurers Guild on the topic as they’re clearly meant for you ;)

Game Information

Game	Bargon Attack
Developer	Coktel Vision
Publisher	Coktel Vision
Release Date	1992
Systems	DOS
Game Engine	Gob

My Playthrough

How Long To Beat?	3 hours
Version Played	DOS via ScummVM
Notes	Walkthrough, Manual

Score

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

Atmosphere (20)	5
Story (25)	5
Experience (15)	4
Impact (10)	1
	21%

Gallery

Footnotes

1. Description from Moby Games ↩