Chris InglisGnomes, developed by the Australian indie studio DYSTOPIAN, emerged on April 5, 2025, as a delightful and surprisingly deep entry into the tower defence genre. This game distinguishes itself with a unique blend of retro aesthetics, strategic gameplay, and roguelite elements, and kept me playing just one more game late into several evenings. With more guilds and biomes to unlock through successive runs, there’s a heap of content to dive in under this nostalgia exterior.
The game’s art style is immediately captivating and gives me memories of playing classics like Granny’s Garden and Lemmings. The aesthetic along with the excellent fantasy music evokes a sense of nostalgia while maintaining a distinct and charming visual that is key to its structure. You can see your home base that you must protect, crop tiles that you can plant gold-earning plants, and a path from the enemy spawn hut. Moving your gnome around can alter the path of the oncoming horde, so strategic placement in order to do the most damage is key.
Gnomes is far more than just a simple tower defence game. As you successfully defend a wave of enemies, you earn gold and that is used to buy crops, houses for gnomes, gnomes themselves, and random upgrades in the shop. The aim is to defend for as long as your gnomes and resources can last. If you let too many enemies through, your home’s hp drops each hit and ultimately you will fail a run, but it is a rewarding learning experience.
At the end of a run, you will unlock new gnome and item types to help you in subsequent runs. The flail gnome is the first upgraded gnome type followed by the ranger, axe, mage and more. Each time a gnome gets a kill, it will earn XP and level up, increasing its damage output. Their hat colour will change and you can mouseover each gnome to see its level and damage output. The flail gnome has an AoE hit zone, but his swing is on a cooldown, so you will want to place a quick-hitting standard gnome in his vicinity to catch any stragglers. There are also more guilds and biomes to unlock, so while this looks like a simple game on the surface, its content runs very deep with high replayability.
You therefore must carefully manage resources, strategically place gnome defenders, and adapt to ever-changing threats. You can mouse-over the enemy spawn hut to have an idea of what you will face in the next raid. It is easy to concentrate just spending money on adding houses and gnome defenders, but you should balance this with purchasing items from the shop that will give your gnomes strategic bonuses, or plant better crops that will yield more gold per day. The combination of crop management, and gnome placement, makes for a very interesting game loop.
Overall, DYSTOPIAN’s Gnomes is a delightful and surprisingly deep game that offers a fresh take on the tower defence genre. I absolutely love its retro aesthetic and add in the addictive gameplay loop and indie charm make it a highly recommended game to check out.
This review utilised a key provided by the developers and Gnomes is out now on Steam.
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