Gnomdom

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Review code provided by the kind folks at Silesia Games)

Gnomdom is a Puzzle game released in 2024 on PC and ported in 2025 to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. In this game, players help to gather together 12 errant gnomes for a birthday party, with each of them being stuck or trapped in some way requiring players to solve a different sort of puzzle.

The presentation here is quite nice, with colorful 2D visuals that look like painted paper cutouts backed by relaxing (though somewhat repetitive) piano melodies. This definitely gives the game a mellow tone that works well for this sort of chill experience.

For the gameplay, players can either use standard gamepad controls via an on-screen cursor, or they can interact with the game in portable mode using a touchscreen. Each of the gnomes is in a different location, with each location containing multiple self-contained puzzles, meaning you won’t have to worry about completing puzzles in one area to access something in another area, and you can take each area in any order you like.

The puzzles here vary in quality. Some use basic traditional puzzles like a sliding tile puzzle, a “rush hour”-style puzzle, or a Tower of Hanoi-style puzzle, some require observation of the environment, one or two are actually a bit clever… and sometimes you’ll just want to try interacting with everything you can just to see what happens so you can figure out what you’re even supposed to be doing.

This game gives no text instructions, doesn’t show you on-screen hot spots, and doesn’t have any hint system whatsoever. This means that while you might breeze through some puzzles, if you get stuck on one, you will just remain stuck until you figure it out on your own, and sometimes you can be scratching your head without a clue what to do for a while. If you don’t get stuck, you’ll be finished with this game within an hour or so. Not very long, but for only $3 that’s not too shabby.

Overall, I think Gnomdom is a decent Puzzle game with a good presentation, but the quality of the puzzles is all over the place, and the lack of guides of a hint system will frustrate younger and less-experienced puzzle solvers. However, if you have a few bucks to spend on a time-waster, you may find this to be worth it.

tl;dr – Gnomdom is a Puzzle game where players solve puzzles to try to gather together missing gnomes for a birthday party. The presentation here is very nice, and some of the puzzles are clever, but others just reuse traditional puzzle types. Plus, without guides, hotspot indicators, or a help system, players who get stuck will likely stay stuck for a while. At only $3 for maybe an hour of play time, this is a decent time-waster, but it does feel like a mixed bag.

Grade: C+

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