I’m holding on to this toilet plunger for dear life. All my friends are dead, cooked to death in an oven or frozen in a fridge. I even saw one explode into a thousand tiny Gnome bits when the old man we were stealing from threw him full-pelt against the wall. It’s just me and this toilet plunger now, and if I make it back to our gnome-mushroom, I get to live another day. Which is more than can be said for my compatriots, but sacrifices must be made.
No, this isn’t a fever dream; it’s Burglin’ Gnomes, the latest in a long line of friend-slop games making a huge splash with just its demo. Like Lethal Company, you work with up to three other players to enter the house of some angry old man, which has an ever-changing layout, to steal his stuff and wreak havoc.
Once you start a round, you have a list of random tasks to complete: steal a personal hygiene item or take something from the living room. But they can also be wilder than that: tase a human, shoot a human, or just break stuff. It’s kind of like YAPYAP or Untitled Goose Game in that regard; you just need to cause chaos
You don’t have to complete all of the tasks, but there is a minimum you need to finish before you can head to your home in the clouds via the small mushroom house you started at. If you succeed, you live to pester another day. But if you fail, you get exploded by some angry formless god and have to start again, back at round one, losing all your resources and crafted items that you managed to gather in your previous run.
But it’s harder to progress through the rounds than you might think. I did not manage to make it to the safe mushroom with the toilet plunger, where I could extract and go safely back to the base. I ran out of time and got swept away by a tornado just steps away from the door. What a sad ending to a horrifically morbid run.
The biggest problem you face in Burglin’ Gnomes is the old man. Now I get it, I’d be pretty mad too if a bunch of gnomes broke into my house, started breaking all my stuff and tased me in the leg. But there’s no need for these levels of violence. The old man is fast, so he’ll grab you in no time and take you away to lock you up somewhere or just straight out murder your ass and go on to find his next victim.
You can rescue friends from locked freezers or ovens, or head back to the mushroom where you start your run to resurrect them. But this takes a lot of time, which you could otherwise spend ticking off tasks in your checklist.
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This is what often stumped my friends. We were either too scared to try and do anything as the old man was roaming around all the rooms, or someone was too preoccupied with tormenting him to actually get anything done.
You need a surprising amount of coordination among friends to play Burglin’ Gnomes. I’ve found the best strategy is to have two decoys, which can distract the old man and then have two people dedicated to ticking off the list of tasks. That way, you can haunt the old man and get everything you need to do done; it’s the best of both worlds.
Burglin’ Gnomes only has a demo out right now, but that was all I needed to convince me that this will be the next great co-op indie game. It’s got all the right stuff to warrant a REPO-like explosion onto the gaming scene, funny little guys, a good dose of horror, death, and a fun soundtrack. I can’t wait to play more.
Oh, and before I forget, there’s a killer cat in the house as well. Have fun with that.
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