EcoGnomix is a roguelite city builder developed by Irox Games and published by Untold Tales. Each run differs from the last, with strategy (and math) being your best friend. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this title when I began playing it, but over time, it grew on me.

This title begins with a brief cut scene of a greedy gnome discovering there may be treasure buried deep below, guarded by chickens. He defeats those chickens and sets up camp in the middle of nowhere to create a village of gnomes to help him dive deep into the caves and find that treasure.

There are three caves to explore, and each one is broken into three sections. The first section of the first cave acts as a tutorial for EcoGnomix. You’ll learn how to dig deeper into the cave system by hiring different gnomes to do the work for you. Each gnome costs a certain amount of wood, which is one of the main resources you’ll earn. They vary from wood gnomes (who gather wood), food gnomes (who gather food), and special gnomes who can do a little bit of everything. For example, a woodcutter is the basic gnome with an axe, who chops bushes and logs for wood. A huntress has a bow to defeat chickens for food. The ninja, one of the special gnomes, can chop wood and defeat chickens.

You can upgrade your gnomes as you go deeper into the caves. Some rooms will be a shop where you can spend wood to give them a boost. Productivity and float are excellent upgrades where your gnome will get an extra action per turn, and float allows them to stand anywhere, not just on the main tiles. However, there are also upgrades for specific gnomes. For example, the huntress with the bow and arrow can get a range upgrade where she can attack up to two titles away instead of one.

Of course, this all depends on good RNG. The more upgrades you unlock via the skill tree in the city, the more random your choices will be. Also, it costs wood to upgrade a gnome, so if you don’t have enough wood, then you can simply use the shop as a brief resting area. You’ll want a breather now and again because the deeper you go into the caves, the more brutal EcoGnomix gets.

Each time you enter the caves, the layout is randomly generated. The map branches where you can choose where you’d like to go next or where you’d like to end up. Some caves on the map appear empty, but that only means it’s a general area. Other caves will have a food icon, which means that spot has an extra amount of food. Food is important in EcoGnomix because it’s for the bats. At the end of each turn, bats appear to eat and, if you run out of food, they attack, and you get booted out of the caves. Each floor of the caves spawns more bats, so you always want to be ahead with food. This is where the math comes in. If you can only gather seven food in one turn and you have eight bats, then you’ll lose one food, and it might not be worth it to take that turn. Instead, just move down to the next floor.

You have to take at least one turn before being able to move onto the next floor of the caves. Each turn allows your gnome seven actions, which they’ll take automatically. It’s up to you to strategically place them around the resources to get the most out of each turn. Up to seven resources (bushes, chickens, etc.) will be on one tile. If a tile has four bushes and you put a gnome there, they’ll gather four wood. Unless there is something else they can gather on another adjacent tile to them, they’ll sit doing nothing for the remaining three actions of the turn. EcoGnomix is all about strategic placement and doing the math to ensure you earn the maximum amount of resources per turn.

It sounds confusing; I know. It took me a handful of runs to fully understand what I needed to do to progress. However, progression isn’t easy to come by in this game. In between cave runs, you’ll be in the city where you can create buildings using the resources you gathered to make production areas to create more resources. For example, you can create maps that allow you to skip a floor in the caves without doing a turn, or rations, which enables you to begin your run with ten extra food. These resources are also used to unlock varying upgrades in the skill tree for the cave system. These are the upgrades that will boost your gnomes on random floors throughout a run.

Even after I had everything maxed out and there were no other possible ways for me to improve my gnomes or city (gnomes do not carry over from one run to another, by the way), I had a difficult time beating the first cave. I got through the first two areas with no problem. I even made it through the third area with relative ease. However, there is a boss at the bottom of the cave, and that’s what I had difficulty with. By the time I got to the boss, I almost never had enough food to feed the bats in between each turn. There were a handful of times I had the boss down to five HP, but not enough food to last one more turn. It grew frustrating because I had maxed everything out, so the only hope I had in defeating the first cave was good RNG for each floor.

It took me ten hours to finally beat the first area of the game. Only then will the next cave unlock. It’s a desert area with scorpions as the food, water systems, and more. It’s much more difficult than the first area. At the time of writing this review, I’ve already unlocked most of the skill tree for the second area but can’t get past the first area of the cave. I’m going to be there for a long, long time.

EcoGnomix is a complicated game, but easy enough to understand once you get a controller in your hand. The gameplay is simple with responsive controls and minimal buttons to use with the main gimmick being your thinking cap. I feel the game relies a little heavily on RNG, but the game isn’t impossible to get through. You’ll need some serious patience, though. This game is a solid strategy title where you can decide to do one run or two here and there. The first cave took me about twenty to thirty minutes to get through each run, and most of those runs were all the way to the boss. Since I put ten hours into the game before beating the first cave, you can do the math to figure out roughly how many runs I did before I finally unlocked the next cave.

If you want a difficult strategy game that’s unique enough from all the rest, EcoGnomix should be on your list to try.