- April 4, 2025
- DYSTOPIAN
- 17h median play time
Gnomes
Platforms
About Gnomes
Gnomes is a single player survival city builder game with fantasy and economy themes. It was developed by DYSTOPIAN and was released on April 4, 2025. It received overwhelmingly positive reviews from players.
Gnomes is a turn-based tower defense with deep roguelike progression, set in ever-expanding, procedurally generated biomes. Build, farm and defend your village as you push deeper into goblin-infested territory. Unlock powerful upgrades and craft your environment to survive the endless goblin horde



Games Like Gnomes
Looking for games like Gnomes? Here are top survival city builder recommendations with a fantasy and economy focus, selected from player-similarity data — start with Emberward, Nordhold or Combolands: Roguelike Citybuilder.
Reviews
- Unique and engaging tower defense with roguelike elements and dynamic maze building.
- High replayability due to varied maps, guilds, relics, and randomized enemy paths.
- Charming retro pixel art, excellent sound design, and immersive music atmosphere.
- Steep difficulty spikes late in the campaign and in endless mode can feel frustrating.
- Heavy reliance on RNG can result in tedious restarts and some unbalanced builds.
- Micromanagement of moving units every turn may become tedious and impact pacing.
gameplay
137 mentions Positive Neutral NegativeThe gameplay of this tower defense roguelike blends strategic maze-building, unit positioning, and dynamic enemy pathing to create a fast-paced, addictive experience with significant depth and variety. Players appreciate the fresh and elegant mechanics, meaningful synergies, and multiple playstyles, though some find the learning curve challenging and the gameplay occasionally reliant on luck or exploitable combos. Overall, it offers a satisfying core loop with high replayability and a polished, nostalgic feel.
“Gnomes is a very challenging game that with its mix of rogue-like and tower defense mechanics makes it feel a bit like chess where every move has to be meticulously planned out before each round begins.”
“And while the concept of a pixel art roguelike tower defense game sounds generic and played out, Gnomes actually delivers above and beyond on making its mechanics and systems feel meaningfully different than your standard genre title.”
“The creativity of the system inspires branching playstyles that go beyond just choosing a farming-heavy build, and instead force gameplay that utilizes the rest of the game's mechanics in fresh and interesting ways.”
“The upgrades and gameplay feel like they don't give you a chance to know what you should be doing, so the outcome is based on exploitable conditions, which the game isn't really about - so if you know the game mechanics, you can exploit these conditions, and it becomes unfun, because the game is so much more based on not having good luck as opposed to strategy and RNG.”
“Gameplay loop feels weird to me and not fun.”
“The gameplay is also fairly tedious, requiring you to constantly micro-manage your units and items.”
Play Times
Frequently Asked Questions
Gnomes is a survival city builder game with fantasy and economy themes. Common tags for Gnomes include turn-based, indie, roguelite, colony sim, pixel graphics and others.
Gnomes is available on PC and Windows.
On average players spend around 19 hours playing Gnomes.
Gnomes was released on April 4, 2025.
Gnomes was developed by DYSTOPIAN.
Gnomes has received overwhelmingly positive reviews from players. Most players liked Gnomes for its gameplay but disliked it for its grinding.
Gnomes is a single player game.
Similar games include Emberward, Nordhold, Combolands: Roguelike Citybuilder, Die in the Dungeon, Thronefall and others.










