Our grandpa gnome is celebrating his 100th birthday and he’d like to have a birthday party with his 12 gnome friends. All his friends seem to be trapped in various nature-themed puzzles though, so it is up to us to save them and make the cute birthday party bash a success.
Welcome to Gnomdom. In this hand-drawn cosy-themed puzzle game, we’ll be tackling a variety of traditional puzzle types to help rescue the gnomes. Each gnome has a single screen with two or three connected puzzles to be solved. One might be a memory game to match pairs of insects and once you succeed, they fly away to reveal a sliding block puzzle straight out of the Rushhour board game. Solving that then unlocks a sowing kit to build a wrench to pull a gnome from a hole that it’s fallen into. It’s that kind of traditional puzzler where timing doesn’t matter – it is logic, pattern recognition and a bit of maths that matter.
I must applaud Gnomdom for making each puzzle look and feel unique. Whether it is a Tower of Hanoi style move the blocks around puzzle to play a panpipe or a Hungarian ring style sliding colour puzzle with flowers – they feel unique. The graphical style makes every screen feel whimsical and the playful sound effects and ambience help sell the village picnic feel of Gnomdom. My main complaint is that there are a few too many slider puzzles which are like personal kryptonite to me. I can’t do them and I find them incredibly frustrating and dull too. You can’t skip any puzzles and there is a distinct lack of a hint system too.
The lack of hints brings up my only objective critique of Gnomdom beyond “I don’t like slider puzzles”. Gnomdom is a game that is entirely wordless and asks its graphical design and cursor to do the heavy lifting of gameplay explanations. In most cases, this works well as you can hover the cursor over everything and see if it changes – interact with the object and see what happens. Some puzzles don’t reveal their end goal straight away though and I did find myself missing a couple of key pieces of information by accident that would have made some puzzles make more sense. The random clicking around helps to uncover 12 hidden photos of your gnome friends as the sole side mission though. I’d also argue that the difficulty of Gnomdom is probably too high for young children. Instead, I think Gnomdom is best played as a family because the logic puzzles require a fair amount of brain power to solve even if you know what the end goal is.
I think the cosy game crowd will bask in the gnomey glory of Gnomdom though. It is relatively short, taking a couple of hours to clear at the most, but it doesn’t repeat itself or outstay its welcome. If you don’t enjoy very traditional puzzles, the kind you’d often find in hidden object games, then you might not enjoy Gnomdom much. However, the luscious storybook vibes from the beautiful artwork might just be enough to keep you going regardless. A gentle puzzler for gentle folk.
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