•Swedish studio Off-leash Interactive, in partnership with publisher Fireshine Oyunlar, has announced Trollheim: Gnomes, a survival-crafting fairytale in which players take on the role of a three-inch-high gnome exploring a procedurally generated forest drawn from Nordic folklore.
The game tasks players with clambering up enormous trees, lighting campfires beneath mushrooms and either befriending or evading larger supernatural creatures known as “Väsen”.
A briefing for the game was held earlier this month. According to a report by Rock Paper Shotgun, the studio is interested in the title’s eight-player multiplayer mode, which reportedly creates opportunities for hide-and-seek through its building system that allows dwellings to be camouflaged against the litter, moss and mold of the forest floor.
Off-leash Interactive is a new studio founded by experienced industry figures. Trollheim game director Jojje Dalunde spent nine years at DICE, the creator of Battlefield, while CEO Jakob Munthe is a former executive producer at Paradox Interactive, whose recent credits include Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. Art producer Josefin Lindgren has worked at Starbreeze, developer of Payday, and Coldwood Interactive, makers of Unravel.
Trollheim: Gnomes is the first project in a narrative universe founded by filmmaker Björne Larson, who and other members of the team reportedly draw on their own childhood memories of Nordic woodland lore. “When my parents divorced, I lost the concept of home, until my grandmother took me into these forests we grew up in, telling me about the gnomes and trolls and fairies who lived there and thrived there,” Larson told journalists during the briefing. “Ultimately the forest made me feel at home, and cared for.”
The game is not combat-led, though it opens with scenes of strife: the Sprýg Gnomes are driven out from Midgård by a corrupted Oden and forced to relocate to the wildwoods of Trollheim. Non-player denizens can be threatening—hungry trolls may target food—but the Väsen are broadly characterised as “neighbours” rather than enemies, with players tasked with finding their niche alongside them.
The developers gave an example during the briefing of snaring a troll with a rope trap, calming it with flute music and then offering it a stew. A gifting system is designed to revive downed players and NPCs, requiring identification and preparation of appropriate remedies, though Off-leash did not elaborate on details.
There are no character classes; specialisation comes through what players craft and wear.
The environment has drawn comparisons to Obsidian’s Grounded, with developers noting the greater scale of its tree trunks. The studio reportedly worked to capture both the canopy’s height and the detail of twigs, berries, fungus and boulders, alongside babbling brooks and moonlit lakes.
However, some familiar open-world survival elements have drawn criticism during hands-off play: a hang-glider has been compared to one in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and a building system using holographic templates reportedly disrupts the illusion of assembling dwellings from forest debris. Developers argued that the small scale and level of creative control combine into something distinctive.
The gnome architectural designs have been described as attractive, with prospects for concealing them among spruce and pine roots or constructing nests linked by ropeways high in the branches. There reportedly is no player versus player mode, though tribes of players may hide from one another. Players seeking a more solitary experience can reportedly play the whole game solo and offline.
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