This month is a busy one for promising roguelike games, and today (September 10th) alone there are five interesting titles dropping around the same time. However, of all of those games, I think Shroom and Gloom has me the most intrigued, and so when Team Lazerbeam sent me Early Access, and given how much I love a nice mushroom risotto, I eagerly dived into this weird, fungal deckbuilder.
What is Shroom and Gloom?
Just in case you’re coming in cold, Shroom and Gloom is a deckbuilder with a couple of really interesting ideas underpinning it. On the one hand, it plays out from a first-person perspective, which is fairly novel in the roguelike deckbuilder space, and on the other, it lets you play around with two different decks at once.
The game as it stands today is incomplete, and Team Lazerbeam has already stated that they intend to keep it in Early Access for a year or two. That’ll give them plenty of time to iterate, take notes from the community feedback they covet, and work on the third section of the game that isn’t in place just yet.
First-person dungeon crawling
The world you interact with is visually striking. The art style drew admiring comments from my wife while I was playing, and for good reason. There’s tremendous pop to the presentation, which is based on cardboard cutouts and uses a parallax effect to create the illusion of depth. I can’t lie, I did find the approach a little hard on my eyes; however, I’ve got funky vision, so trust your own peepers on this one.
The dungeon world of Shroom and Gloom might be a horrible, miserable place full of death and fungus, but it’s also a joy to explore – enough for me to push through my depth perception issues and still have a good time as I shuffled up and down its claustrophobic tunnels and in and out of cavernous chambers.
At the heart of my gleeful exploration of this dank world is the game’s first deck of cards. These cards represent items that you can use to interact with certain points of interest before you, but I was surprised by just how intuitive the system is. There is a surprising amount that you can do, and it doesn’t feel tacked on.
In fact, at times I felt like I was playing a really elegant point-and-click adventure and not a deckbuilder at all. Except in Shroom and Gloom, there are no bullshit cryptic clues; instead, you have the added pressure of taking damage if you linger in one place for too long.
Mushroom Mania
The other deck comes into play whenever you stumble into a battle. This is perhaps the most traditional part of Shroom and Gloom, and so I’m looking for consistent evolution, balanced cards, and the potential for interesting gameplay synergies. So far, everything seems in order, and the combat is as intuitive as the exploration.
The cards are particularly fun, with thematic art, clear descriptions, and a simple approach to health management that encourages adventurous play. In fact, the whole combat system is cleverly conceived, and I was thinking about how to balance the game’s unique elements before the end of my first run.
With multiple characters to work through and two distinct pathways to explore, there’s already a solid slice of game here. Yet Shroom and Gloom is still only in Early Access, and so I don’t want to go overboard with my praise, nor play too far into things before the developers have finished their work. What I will say is that my first impression has been tremendously positive, and by the end of its journey to launch, I suspect it will be even better still.
Shroom and Gloom is out now on PC (Mac, Win), and I played via access kindly provided by those fun guys and gals at Devolver Digital and Team Lazerbeam.
