Finally, a fantasy game filled with adorable gnomes that you can punch right in their adorable faces

(Image credit: Carl Carpenter)

A peaceful fantasy realm. A lush and gentle forest. Hark! Mythical creatures wander hither and thither: gnomes! Tiny and cute, with their pointy red hats and bushy little beards, gnomes inhabit this serene forest glade, harmlessly communing with nature.

That is until you show up and start punching them in their adorable little faces.

Wrong. It's a full-on woodland brawl. Forget the rumble in the jungle, this is the altercation in the vegetation. They swarm me and I punch them and they swarm me some more and I punch them some more. I know I'm beating up a bunch of innocent little mystical creatures, but I can't pretend socking them in their cherubic little faces isn't fun.

In Fight-Quest you're not just limited to punching. You can dodge, which is useful once some taller, more musclebound gnomes begin to appear, the ones that can take a few punches and deliver a few of their own. This being a magical forest, there are also enchanted mushrooms that will fling you up into the air, letting you do a classic "ground pound" when you land that will dispatch any gnome in its radius.

Plus, every so often, a disturbingly sexy Zelda N64-style woodland fairy (video for context if you haven't played Ocarina of Time) will appear and offer you a choice of power-ups, like increased damage or improved health or the chance for your furious fists to do fire damage to your enemies. (Your enemies are, remember, largely harmless gnomes.)

As you pummel your way through the endless number of gnomes, they'll eventually summon one of their friends, a magic frog whose staff attacks hit with the force of an angry Gandalf. You can pummel that frog, too, if it doesn't fry you before you get within melee range, but there are more frogs where that came from. I played a few rounds and it's always some damn frog wizard that winds up dropping me.

Fight-Quest is only in demo form at the moment, but honestly, check it out. Punching gnomes into next week isn't a bad way to spend a few minutes.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

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