"Gnome heists nail the laughs, the bugs end the runs"
About
Burglin' Gnomes is an online co-op game for small teams who play tiny gnomes breaking into a hostile old man's house. Each run drops you into a procedurally arranged home where you grab loot, repurpose household junk, and complete three of five randomly assigned tasks to satisfy the High-Gnome's quota. A grumpy resident and a roster of animals (boar, bees, seals, evil red-capped gnomes) hunt you while you scramble. Between runs you spend resources like fraggles and clonk to craft equipment such as spring boots and upgrade your home base, though dying costs you most of what you carried.
Verdict
With three friends, Burglin' Gnomes earns its laughs through sheer slapstick: the old man's chase, the boar's ambush, a plunger turned escape tool. The trouble is how often a vanishing key or a window that launches you off the map ends the fun for reasons nothing to do with skill. Underneath the chaos sits a thin game that shows you almost everything in six hours, then leaves your capped resources nowhere to go. At under ten euros with an attentive developer, it's a worthwhile night for a co-op group, just not the lasting habit some hoped the demo promised.
You'll like it if …
- +You want a cheap, chaotic evening with a regular co-op group and a high tolerance for jank
- +Emergent comedy matters more to you than a steady progression chase
- +Physics-driven slapstick is the whole appeal
You'll dislike it if …
- −A run ruined by a bug rather than your own mistake will sour the whole session
- −You need meta-progression to keep coming back past the first handful of hours
- −You mostly play solo
Breakdown
- +The break-in loop turns slapstick fast: physics-driven grabs, a chasing old man and panicked scrambles produce the kind of stories friends retell
- +Environmental interactions and enemy encounters (the charging boar especially) land genuine jolts
- +Tools like spring boots and the toilet plunger feed the goofy improvisation
- −The old man's lethality swings wildly from harmless to instant death with no readable logic
- −Enemy spawning and difficulty scaling feel unbalanced, punishing without intent
- −Window prompts and physics can fling you across the map and kill you, jank that ends runs rather than amusing
- +Multiple maps, equipment crafting and a house you can build out give early runs a clear pull
- +Losing inventory but keeping progress toward upgrades creates a real risk decision each break-in
- −Most players hit a wall around five or six hours once resources cap and objectives stop meaning anything
- −No lasting meta-progression to chase the way comparable extraction games offer
- −Losing house upgrades on death strikes many as punitive rather than tense
- +The absurd setup, robbing a half-empty house down to the last pair of underwear, carries its own deadpan humour
- +Recurring characters like Jonathan the gangster old man become emergent legends in playthroughs
- −There is no authored story; all the charm leans on whatever chaos the run generates
- +The soundtrack hits with real intensity during chases
- +The stylized gnome-eye-view look has a clear identity
- −Houses feel barren, with the same handful of props reused across a level or two
- −Graphical errors like rainbow textures and rooms spawning disconnected from the house break the mood
- +The developer patches reported issues quickly, and hotfixes have been frequent
- −Crucial items like keys vanish when dropped between floors, sometimes softlocking a run
- −Characters clip through walls and fall off the map; AI gets stuck on staircases
- −Crashes and UI scaling problems on ultrawide are common complaints
- −Many reviewers note the launch build feels rougher than the demo it grew from
score
