The Nom

Genre: Stealth

Players: 1

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Review:

The Nom is a Stealth game released on mobile devices in 2022, then ported to PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch in 2024. This game puts players in the role of a man turned into a monstrous black tentacled blob creature looking to escape a lab and track down the evil scientist that transformed him.

The presentation here is mostly pretty simple, using plain-looking 3D visuals with the sort of plain-looking 3D characters you’ve seen in countless mobile games by now. The exception here is the blob creature itself, which has spidery tentacle legs with a look that evokes Marvel’s Venom character. This character isn’t exactly technically impressive, but it’s artistically far more interesting than the entirety of the game around it. All of this is backed by a low-key soundtrack that’s completely forgettable.

The gameplay itself has some really great ideas. You start with the ability to absorb victims, and gain additional abilities throughout the game, such as transforming into a chair to escape the notice of attackers walking through your area. Attackers have a visible cone of vision that you generally need to stay out of, but even when spotted you can still hurry and attack to keep from taking too much damage, at least most of the time. Players craving a more “pure” stealth also have a standard stealth mode where players don’t have these abilities, and must reach stages’ exits without attacking or being spotted.

While there’s a lot to like here, the big problem this game has is that your nebulous shape makes hit detection a real crapshoot. Not only do you have no idea what parts of your creature body enemies can and can’t see, but it’s also hard to tell when you’re close enough to attack. This becomes particularly frustrating when you’re climbing over a wall and attacking from above, or trying to, because sometimes even when you overlap an enemy it doesn’t register as being close enough to attack.

Then there’s the fact that you can crawl over walls at all, even in places that don’t seem like you should be able to, like when you’re crawling into open air, or even crawling outside the facility you’re supposed to be escaping from. I suppose this doesn’t terribly affect the gameplay, but it seems like an odd glitch the game’s designers couldn’t have possibly missed but decided not to bother fixing.

And even putting these issues aside, this game’s levels are so short and linear that it makes the entire experience feel shallow and somewhat repetitive, with the game never given the time and space to build interesting level design.

In the end, The Nom has such strong theming that I expect some players will enjoy it just for that. After all, who doesn’t want to be a malicious goo monster sucking the life out of an evil scientist’s hapless flunkies? But this game’s hit detection issues and overall shallow experience make it something that most players will bounce off of once the novelty wears off.

tl;dr – The Nom is a Stealth game that puts players in the role of a tentacled blob creature sneaking and attacking enemies. The theming here is great, but the gameplay itself is shallow and the hit detection is terrible, meaning that you’ll likely lose interest once the novelty wears off.

Grade: C

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