Trollheim Gnomes is a newly announced PC survival crafting game from Off-Leash Interactive, Trollheim Studios, and Fireshine Games, with folklore, optional combat, and a crowded genre to survive.
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A tiny survival game enters a crowded forest
Fireshine Games, Off-Leash Interactive, and Trollheim Studios have announced Trollheim: Gnomes, a co-op PvE survival crafting game for PC that is planned for Steam Early Access later in 2026, according to an announcement reported by Output Lag from the publishers’ press release. IGN’s announcement trailer listing also describes the game as a PC release, playable solo or with up to eight players.
That is the clean news hook. The tension is messier and more interesting: Trollheim Gnomes is arriving in a survival crafting market already thick with base-building, procedural worlds, cozy co-op, and tiny-player fantasy. Its pitch is not simply that players are small. Sources describe a three-inch-high Sprýg Gnome trying to survive a Dark Forest rooted in Nordic folklore, where trolls, faeries, sirens, and other Väsen are potential neighbors as much as threats.
For a survival player, that distinction matters. The genre often turns every unknown sound in the trees into a health bar waiting to be emptied. Trollheim Gnomes, as presented in briefings covered by Rock Paper Shotgun and IGN, is being built around a different pressure: exposure, hunger, wetness, cold, scale, and social risk. The forest can still kill you. The creatures can still become dangerous. But the developers are foregrounding coexistence, preparation, and choice rather than default hostility.
What Trollheim Gnomes actually is
The confirmed setup casts players as the last Sprýg Gnomes of Midgård, driven from home by Oden and his corruption. IGN’s trailer description says the gnomes flee to Trollheim, a magical realm where trolls, faeries, and sirens are real, and set out into the Dark Forest to reunite with lost kin. TechRaptor similarly reports that the Sprýg Gnomes have been forced from their homes by Oden and take up residence in the Dark Forest.
Moment to moment, the Trollheim Gnomes survival game is described as a procedural survival crafting sandbox. Players gather materials from the forest, build shelter, craft tools and weapons, and make homes in places that fit the scale of a three-inch creature. Output Lag, citing the announcement, says housing can be built in treetops, hollowed logs, rock crevices, or beside forest lakes, with features such as bridges, moss-covered walls, and low lighting. TechRaptor reports that leaves, twigs, branches, moss, and other natural materials form the basis for shelters and tools.
That scale is the game’s immediate visual hook. TechRaptor describes branches as roads and leaves as parachutes. Rock Paper Shotgun’s briefing report mentions climbing enormous trees and lighting campfires beneath mushrooms. IGN says progression will let players craft more complex structures and build higher into the trees. The survival fantasy, then, is vertical as well as domestic: the safest home may be above the damp floor, where the forest becomes a tower block of bark, lichen, and shadow.
The sources do not give a price, system requirements, exact Early Access date, or console plans. The practical reading is straightforward: PC players can wishlist it on Steam, according to IGN, but anyone looking for release-day certainty, performance targets, controller details, or console versions will need to wait for Fireshine Games, Off-Leash Interactive, or Trollheim Studios to say more.
The ex-DICE and Paradox roots are useful, but the credits are not the whole story
Rock Paper Shotgun reports that Off-Leash Interactive is a new Swedish studio founded by experienced developers. Its report identifies Trollheim game director Jojje Dalunde as having spent nine years at DICE, best known for Battlefield, and CEO Jakob Munthe as a former executive producer at Paradox Interactive. Rock Paper Shotgun also notes art producer Josefin Lindgren’s past work at Starbreeze and Coldwood Interactive, the studio associated with Unravel.
Those backgrounds do not guarantee a good survival game, and readers should be wary of treating any résumé as a quality seal. But they do suggest why Trollheim Gnomes is aiming at several difficult targets at once. DICE experience is relevant when a game has to support readable spaces, multiplayer movement, and systemic encounters without collapsing into noise. Paradox experience is relevant because survival crafting games live or die by long-tail structure: update cadence, player specialization, systemic friction, and reasons to return after the first weekend.
There is also a source discrepancy worth stating plainly. Rock Paper Shotgun’s supplied report emphasizes ex-DICE, Paradox, Starbreeze, and Coldwood experience. IGN and TechRaptor describe the project as coming from or involving ex-Mojang developers, with TechRaptor saying the team brings Minecraft pedigree and genre understanding. The provided source text does not name those ex-Mojang developers, while it does name the DICE and Paradox figures. That does not make the Mojang claim false, but it does mean the better-supported staffing details here are the specific DICE and Paradox credits reported by Rock Paper Shotgun.
The useful takeaway is not brand-name archaeology. It is that Trollheim Gnomes appears to be built by people who understand that a survival game needs two loops working at once: the minute-to-minute anxiety of staying warm, fed, and alive, and the slower pull of settlement, identity, and return visits.
Folklore changes the survival pressure when monsters are neighbors
The most interesting design claim around Trollheim Gnomes is that combat is optional. IGN quotes game director Jojje Dalunde as saying, “If you want to hang out and make it cozy, that’s up to you,” and adds his statement that players will be able to achieve the same goals with a friendly approach as with a hostile one. IGN also quotes studio founder Björne Larson saying the team wants combat to feel intentional and opt-in.
That changes the way the forest reads. In many survival crafting games, the unknown is a combat prompt. Here, the Väsen are described across sources as powerful forest beings who can be friendly or dangerous depending on how players engage them. Rock Paper Shotgun reports that the developers characterized them broadly as “neighbours,” not enemies, while also noting that hungry trolls may come after your food. TechRaptor says players can make the Väsen friend or foe, leading to different outcomes.
Rock Paper Shotgun’s briefing example is especially telling: players might snare a troll with a rope trap, calm it with flute music, then offer stew. That is still a confrontation. A trapped troll is not a tea party. But it frames survival as reading a creature’s needs and temper instead of simply measuring damage output. The same report says the game’s gifting system is tied to reviving downed players and NPCs, requiring players to identify and prepare an appropriate remedy, though Off-Leash did not provide further detail.
For horror and survival players, this is where the premise has teeth. Optional combat does not remove threat. It can make threat more personal, because the player has to choose whether they caused the escalation. A dark forest with creatures that do not automatically attack can be more unnerving than one full of predictable aggro cones. The danger is ambiguity: a neighbor at dusk, a missing food store, a flute in your pack, and the question of whether you prepared the right offering before the branches started moving.
Crafting, co-op, and the risk of becoming familiar too quickly
Trollheim Gnomes has many familiar survival crafting ingredients. It has gathering, base-building, procedural generation, solo play, co-op, hostile conditions, and a Steam Early Access plan. IGN reports cold, wetness, and hunger as survival threats, with a single life bar incorporating health and stamina. The same preview says crafting extends beyond housing to traversal items such as wingsuits, and that the hands-off demo showed stealth elements.
The strongest mechanical differentiators currently visible are scale, vertical building, and social creature handling. Rock Paper Shotgun notes that the building system may allow dwellings to be camouflaged against forest-floor litter, moss, and mold, creating possibilities for hide-and-seek in eight-player multiplayer. IGN says the Dark Forest procedurally generates every time players start a new game, and Output Lag reports that the game supports up to eight players in co-op or solo.
There is also no class system, according to Rock Paper Shotgun’s briefing report. Player specialization is instead tied to what players craft and wear. That is a sensible fit for a survival game about improvisation. It also carries a balancing challenge: gear-based identity needs enough friction to make choices meaningful, but not so much that a friendly, cozy session becomes a spreadsheet in a treehouse.
TechRaptor reports that the developers see Trollheim Gnomes as a game players return to over time, with patches and player feedback helping it grow substantially. That aligns with the Early Access strategy reported by Output Lag, but it is also the crowded genre’s great promise and great trap. A survival game that launches thin can be defended as a foundation. A survival game that launches unfocused can spend years chasing the shape players expected on day one.
The personal folklore pitch gives the game its clearest identity
Rock Paper Shotgun reports that Trollheim Gnomes is the first project in a narrative universe founded by filmmaker Björne Larson. IGN describes a broader Trollheim effort spanning books, games, collectibles, film, and lifestyle, with a 288-page book titled Trollheim: Tale of Sýstir available now. Output Lag likewise says the publishers describe Trollheim as a wider transmedia fantasy property.
Transmedia plans can sound like a business deck before a game has earned a campfire. The more grounded part of the pitch is Larson’s own explanation, reported by Rock Paper Shotgun. Speaking to journalists, he said that after his parents divorced, he lost the concept of home until his grandmother took him into the forests where he grew up and told him about gnomes, trolls, and fairies. “Ultimately the forest made me feel at home, and cared for,” Larson said.
That memory clarifies the difference between a folklore skin and a folklore-driven survival game. Trollheim Gnomes is not being sold as a Viking power fantasy. It is about a displaced small people entering a living place that is older, larger, and only partly knowable. If the game can make home feel earned rather than placed from a crafting menu, its Nordic folklore survival crafting angle could separate it from the genre’s usual checklist.
The concern, raised directly by Rock Paper Shotgun’s writer, is that some of it may still prove generic. That concern is fair. Procedural forests, cozy co-op, small heroes in huge environments, and Early Access survival loops are all familiar. The difference will be in pressure: whether rain matters, whether hunger pushes hard choices, whether the Väsen have enough behavioral texture to feel like beings rather than vendors with horns, and whether the forest’s audio and traversal make players listen before they act.
Should survival players wishlist it or wait?
Based on the confirmed information, Trollheim Gnomes is worth watching if you want a co-op survival game with less emphasis on compulsory combat and more interest in shelter, weather, food, stealth, creature behavior, and folklore mood. It is also a practical fit for groups that like building together, since the announced player cap is eight and the world is procedurally generated.
It is too early to treat it as a known quantity. The sources provided do not include hands-on impressions, pricing, PC requirements, server details, save structure, progression length, accessibility options, or how polished the Early Access build will be. Output Lag reports a Steam Early Access launch later in 2026, but no exact date is confirmed in the supplied material.
The cautious advice is to wishlist rather than preorder, especially because Early Access survival games depend heavily on launch stability, update discipline, and whether the first build has enough meaningful systems to sustain repeat play. The hopeful read is that Trollheim Gnomes has a sharper premise than many new crafting sandboxes: a dark Nordic forest where survival pressure comes from scale, weather, appetite, and diplomacy with things much bigger than you.
If Off-Leash Interactive, Trollheim Studios, and Fireshine Games can make the Väsen feel unpredictable without becoming unfair, and make a tree hollow feel like a hard-won refuge rather than a decorative base slot, Trollheim Gnomes could find its own path through a very crowded wood.