Burglin’ Gnomes is an online co-op stealth heist game from solo developer Fobri, where you and up to five friends play as tiny gnomes breaking into the homes of unsuspecting humans. The pitch is simple: sneak in, steal stuff, complete your jobs for the mysterious High-Gnome, and get out before things go horribly wrong. A free demo dropped recently and hit over 15,000 concurrent players at its peak. For a game that isn’t even fully out yet, that’s a remarkable number, and it’s not hard to see why.
Small Gnomes, Big Problems
The first thing that grabs you is the scale. You’re a gnome. The house is enormous. Countertops are cliff faces. A dropped mug is basically a boulder. Everything in a normal human home (the furniture, the appliances, the layout) becomes a strange and dangerous landscape when you’re navigating it from six inches off the ground. It’s a clever trick, and it completely transforms how a familiar space feels. Suddenly a living room isn’t just a living room. It’s a maze with very bad sightlines and an angry old man somewhere inside it.
That old man is the main thing standing between you and a successful run, and he does not mess around. He’s fast, reactive, and when he catches a gnome, the results are darkly comedic at best. Friends can be locked in freezers, tossed into ovens, or dealt with in ways that the game handles with a gleeful brutality. You can rescue captured teammates by sprinting back to the mushroom spawn point to resurrect them, or physically breaking them out mid-run. But every rescue costs time, and time is the one thing you never have enough of.
Orders From Above
Keeping the pressure on is the High-Gnome himself, your airborne overlord who issues a checklist of jobs at the start of each run. Tasks range from the mundane (steal something from the bedroom) to the wonderfully unhinged (tase a human, flood the toilet, break the TV). You don’t need to finish every single one, but you do need to hit a minimum before you can extract. And extraction means making it back to the mushroom house and riding a tornado out. Yes, a tornado. Human laws don’t apply to gnomes, and apparently neither does basic meteorology.
Beyond the chaos of each run, there’s a crafting and progression system waiting in the full game. Stolen items aren’t just loot. They’re materials you can repurpose to craft equipment, build furniture, and upgrade your floating gnome home base between missions. It’s a promising layer of depth on top of what already looks like a very entertaining core loop, and it suggests Fobri is building something with real legs rather than just a one-session party trick.
The Next One to Watch
The co-op game space has had some massive indie hits lately, with titles like Lethal Company and REPO showing just how much appetite there is for funny, chaotic multiplayer experiences built around a simple but clever premise. Burglin’ Gnomes slots naturally into that conversation. It has the right ingredients: a genuinely funny concept, a threat that keeps you on your toes, and just enough coordination required that every run produces its own ridiculous stories.
Burglin’ Gnomes doesn’t have a release date yet, but the free demo is live on Steam right now and the developer has confirmed it’s staying up indefinitely. If you’ve been looking for something to throw at your group chat, this is worth a look. Wishlisting it takes about four seconds. The High-Gnome would appreciate it.
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