Now children let me interrupt our currently ongoing game of the year coverage to tell you the story of a little game headed to the app store today called Gnomium. The game is a free to play word based puzzle game, or at least that’s what it looks like on first inspection. You wouldn’t be blamed for looking at Gnomium’s game board and presuming it to be some kind of educational software, but what you’re actually going to be getting is something much more unique.
Gnomium has a lot going on under the hood, sometimes to its detriment. This is most evident in the game’s tutorial which walks you through the mechanics at a blistering pace that definitely leaves you with more questions than answers. You start each round in the game with a finite 400 letter tiles. Your ultimate goal beyond getting a high score is to open the chest on screen that will refill or increase your number of letter tiles. How do we get that chest open? Well it’s kind of an ordeal, each letter on the board has a numerical score tied to it, combine those letters into words and you can use your pickaxe to break them apart and get the score, if your word is worth enough points it will change into copper, silver, or gold ore accordingly. Breaking apart ore will produce coins, match three copper coins to get a silver one, three silvers to get a gold and so on, once you match three gold coins it will produce one of three randomly colored gems, if you’re lucky and the gem you create matches your chest, you’ll be able to combine the two to expand your playtime. Gems eventually mutate into tiers, and combining three of the same gem will create a random gem from the next tier and open up the next set of chests.
Oh and I almost forgot, some tiles will turn into stone in order to impede your progress, these can be broken apart either by adding letters to increase their score or by using the chisel/hammer items that occasionally drop during play.
I feel as though I just dropped a metric ton of information explaining what feels like a relatively simple game in practice. I can see the challenge in making a tutorial for something like this but I still feel like what I got could have been much better streamlined and rolled into the UI. I would have preferred the game have me play a round where I’m just supposed to match letters, then another where coins are thrown in, then another with chests and gems, then another with stone tiles, and so on and so forth. This would have been much more effective than just showing a bunch of tables at the beginning and sending me off to the races.
Oh god, is there going to be a test on this?!
Players who can get past the barrier of entry will find a lot to like with Gnomium, the graphics are colorful and fun, and chipping away at huge chunks of words can feel deeply satisfying. There’s a huge array of power ups to find and even after hours of gameplay I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface. There’s a lot of content here for the price, which I suppose is what we should talk about next.
Gnomium follows a familiar method of allowing you to play for free with the caveat that every three games you watch a thirty second ad. Players who would prefer to skip the ads can pay a $2.99 fee and enjoy the game free of distractions, well, almost. During play you’ll notice gift boxes spawning on the screen, these contain valuable power ups that can really assist you in prolonging your game and increasing your score, the catch is that you either have to pay fifty gold or watch a short ad to get your upgrade. While these items are very valuable to your play I found that watching a thirty second ad in the middle of the game threw a big wrench in its fast paced nature. This is also something you can’t pay you way out of, so most of the time you’ll likely just ignore presents when they appear.
Admittedly sometimes Gnomium seems confused about what type of game it actually is. Is it a word search? Is it a match three? The game moves at too fast of a pace to really do a lot with the word searching aspect, I found that I almost always had better luck indiscriminately shuffling the board around then actually trying to hunt down word combinations, sure I was able to make the occasional word plural or take a little bonus letter onto something but for the most part my best moves in this game always felt more random than intentional. Having said that, I can absolutely see this being the kind of game some people are going to master, conversely I think you can have a perfectly good time without ever even opening a single chest.
As a fun added detail the game will provide you with a sort of mad lib containing the words you found after each match.
Gnomium’s depth may hinder players when they first start out but ultimately the game is wholly unique, breezy, fast moving, and perfect for your iPhone. Game sessions can certainly blow up in time but I finished most of mine in 3-5 minutes which makes this a great option for any free moments you have on the go. I think some users will be put off by the amount of information to process, or the somewhat light word searching aspects, but conversely I think there are a lot of people who are going to be really pleased to find a mobile arcade game with so many mechanics to discover and play with. If you’ve got $2.99 to spare (or nothing if you don’t mind some ads) you should definitely see if Gnomium is the game for you.
