Trollheim: Gnomes, a co-op survival crafting adventure in a Nordic folklore setting, was announced at IGN Fall Fan Fest 2026 on October 14. Developer Off-leash Interactive, with publisher Fireshine Games, has put the game on Steam with an Early Access placeholder and no release date yet.
A Sprýg Gnome is one of the small gnome people at the center of the game’s setting. According to the Steam description, the last Sprýg Gnomes in Midgård have been driven from their home by Oden. Their only refuge is Trollheim, a forest where trolls, faeries and sirens are real. Players explore a procedurally grown Dark Forest as one of those gnomes. They forage, build, and survive cold and hunger. Solo play and offline are supported, but the marquee mode is eight-player co-op.
The vāsen are the trolls, faeries and sirens that share that forest. Game director Jojje Dalunde told PC Gamer the team doesn’t think of those creatures as enemies to clear, but as neighbors. “You as a player get to choose if you are going to be a good neighbor or a bad neighbor,” Dalunde said. “The vāsen in this world will react to how you interact with them and how you behave.” Wander into a troll’s camp and it might yell at you, throw things, or swing. You can also calm it down, give it something, and end up with a campfire companion.
Trollheim: Gnomes is on PC only at launch. Off-leash Interactive lists Jojje Dalunde as game director. Fireshine Games, the UK indie label behind the Core Keeper publishing effort and Day of the Shell, is co-publishing with Trollheim. The studio has not yet announced a release date or pricing for Early Access. There is no word on console versions.
The Steam page already demands an RTX 2070 or Radeon RX 5700 XT and 16GB of RAM at minimum. That cuts off most pre-2018 laptops. It is a real choice when competitors like Enshrouded and Palworld ship at much lower specs.
The reveal lands at a crowded moment for cozy-leaning survival crafting on PC. Valheim, Palworld, Enshrouded and the recent Schedule I have all built devoted followings with similar gathering and crafting loops. Off-leash’s bet is that the small scale and the choose-your-neighbor morality will be enough to stand out. We saw a similar indie-scale reveal at last week’s Indie Spotlight: BOMBANANA and 4 More Indies Worth Your Time. Off-leash’s take is the more ambitious of the two pitches.
Players curious about scale on PC can compare launch-day counts later against Pixel Herald’s tracked player-count data once Trollheim: Gnomes goes live.
Two things make Trollheim: Gnomes worth flagging early. The eight-player cap and the per-creature relationship system put it closer to Valheim than to the larger MMO survival space. The team is leaning on depth per encounter, not scale. The Steam page is also gating the audience up front with the RTX 2070 floor and the 16GB RAM requirement. If Off-leash holds that bar and ships a tight vāsen system, the studio has a real niche in the cozy survival space. If the systems feel thin on a top-spec machine, players will notice fast.
Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report
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Join the discussion Would you rather play a survival game where every monster is a potential friend, or do you prefer the classic kill-or-be-killed loop?
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