A fun fact about myself is that I love mushrooms. I love finding them in the wild, I love putting them on pizza (please don’t put wild mushrooms on your pizza), but most of all I love seeing them in games. It’s quite a niche passion to be sure, but that hasn’t stopped me from running around as a little mushroom man in my current DnD campaign. And now, I get to run around fighting them in my latest roguelike deckbuilder obsession: Shroom and Gloom.
Travelling through a subterranean dungeons full of vines, bones, and (crucially) shrooms, the aim here is to fight your way through areas to complete quests and unlock new characters, gather helpful items, and explore the different pathways.
Pretty standard, right? Wrong. Because Shroom and Gloom isn’t just any old deckbuilder, it’s a deck builder with two decks.
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The first deck is for exploration, there’s shovels to dig for new cards, lighters to start campfires for warmth, and tools to break through doors so you can progress onto the next area, among many, many other things. The catch is that you can only use so many of these in one go, thanks to your limited stamina.
This means you have to be strategic with what you do and when. Early on I made the mistake of getting way too excited digging holes and breaking open treasure chests. I soon had no stamina left to break the lock on the door to progress and I was forced to take a rest.
(Image credit: Devolver Digital)
Now, that doesn’t sound too bad, but resting in a fungal forest full of gloom isn’t very comfortable. You can make campsites more bearable by lighting campfires, killing any shrooms lying around, and removing any human remains. But even then there are some negatives which you can’t avoid. At each campsite you’ll be able to see how much damage you’ll take if you decide to sleep there, and let me tell you, it’s almost never worth the rest.
You also replenish your stamina after each fight, so most of the time you’ll want to just forge ahead and chew through some mushrooms, which brings me onto the second deck: your combat deck.
Dying also isn’t so bad when it means you get to amble through countless hand-drawn stills.
This holds cards which deal damage to enemies, stun them, or heal yourself, readied when you’re jumped by a group of shrooms. The whole idea here is to not just stab your enemies, but take a couple of bites out of them as well; they are mushrooms afterall. You can add spices and hot sauce to them, cook ’em up (which means they’ll take more damage), or just have them plain, whatever tickles your fancy.
My favourite part of fighting in Shroom and Gloom are all the combos. Once I got a hang of it I was dishing out successive attacks which toppled whole groups of mushrooms in no time at all. First I’d add a bit of spice, then mix in some hot sauce, stab a couple of them with my rusty knife, and finally start the flambé; bon appétit.
There’s not a ton of meta progression in Shroom and Gloom so far. But that’s ok because there are a couple of cards which can repeatedly help you through your expedition, and unlocking new characters will grant you different bonuses. But for the most part, good old fashioned practice is what will really help you progress on your runs here. Learning which enemies I should attack first, which cards are the best to get early on, and having the knowledge that I should always feed the rat meant I got further and further through after each death.
Dying also isn’t so bad when it means you get to amble through countless hand-drawn stills which are all layered on top of one another to create the impression of a 3D tunnel. There really is so much to marvel at in Shroom and Gloom so I can’t wait to get stuck in again and follow it throughout its early access journey.
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