Greedy Greedy Gnomes Review
The residents’ savings finance your fortune in Greedy Greedy Gnomes, an incremental game about theft, gnome labor, and increasingly ruthless business decisions.
Greedy Greedy Gnomes. Credit: Nautlander / Future Friends Games
Greedy Greedy Gnomes, the incremental game from solo developer Nautlander and publisher Future Friends Games, is a sharp satire about exploiting labor and colonial plunder. Smashing pots for money, the casually accepted theft familiar from The Legend of Zelda, grows into an operation built on gnome labor, with enough upgrades to keep the theft moving at a comfortable pace.
You arrive in Eldor’Idle by boat, determined to make your fortune. The name invokes El Dorado, the legendary city of gold sought by Spanish colonizers, and you’re here to enrich yourself at the residents’ expense. You click, and later hover over, pots inside their homes, then spend their savings on keys to more buildings, pot upgrades, and gnomes to break them for you. Upgrading your gnomes’ strength and speed increases your income, freeing you to pursue other opportunities around town. The bank entices residents to keep more money in their pots, while the wizard’s tower lets you brew potions for upgrades. Eventually, your gnomes’ labor won’t be enough. You’ll need to sacrifice their blood and souls to Mammon.
Greedy Greedy Gnomes. Credit: Nautlander / Future Friends Games
Greedy Greedy Gnomes. Credit: Nautlander / Future Friends Games
Gnomes sometimes fall asleep or steal coins, giving you reasons to check on them. I never found the lost funds worth stressing over, so I didn’t bother supervising them closely. Upgrades reduce those problems anyway. There’s something appropriate about weighing employee theft against the inconvenience of managing the people you’ve hired to rob everyone else. The one truly tedious part of the game, the mine, also serves the satire. It drives home how boring it is to do labor yourself when you can get gnomes to do it for you elsewhere. That doesn’t make mining any less of a grind. It’s a long way to go to prove the game’s point.
Outside the mine, knowing when to prestige keeps progress from becoming a grind. The blood sacrifice resets your operation in exchange for lasting benefits, making it preferable at times to waiting for another upgrade. Managing that balance kept me moving without getting bored.
The colorful, detailed pixel art recalls classic Zelda, reinforcing the joke about ransacking strangers’ homes. Turning that trope into organized exploitation is frankly brilliant.
I finished with every achievement and saw the true ending in about seven and a half hours. That was just the right length for me. Any longer, and the game would have started to wear thin.
Greedy Greedy Gnomes
Beyond its tedious mine, Greedy Greedy Gnomes keeps the theft and exploitation moving at a comfortable pace and ends before the incremental mechanics wear thin.
The residents’ savings finance your fortune in Greedy Greedy Gnomes, an incremental game about theft, gnome labor, and increasingly ruthless business decisions.