Shroom and Gloom from Team Lazerbeam and Devolver Digital has arrived in Early Access – one of the most interesting looking dungeon-crawling deck-builders ever. Disclosure: a key was provided to GamingOnLinux.
I just can’t get over how insanely cool the artwork is. As the name might suggest, it’s all about fungi! You get to battle, slice and cook your way through various completely bizarre and outlandish looking mushroomy things. All the enemies are supremely weird but I think they’re quite magnificent in their design. Next to the recently reviewed Denshattack! this is easily one of the best looking games I’ve gone through recently.
What really gets me is the absolute magic the designers and programmers together did on the look of it. Yes, it’s 3D, but it’s made to look like it’s all in flat slices that just flow smoothly together as you walk through it. I think I could go on for quite some time about how impeccable it looks. No screenshots will do it justice at all but here’s 2 I took anyway:
Anyway, back to the gameplay. Cooking your enemies? Yes. What a tasty treat they become. They are, after-all, only fungi – just warped into some freakish creatures out of your nightmares. You can poke them with sharp knives and turn them into meals, but what makes it funnier is some of the cards you will use during the combat. Like hot sauce, which turns enemies into a spicy toasty card that heals you and damages enemies. There’s so many funny and strange mechanics with the cards that it’s just joy to explore and discover.
Nice gameplay loop to it too with you walking through these stylized cramped corridors to fight, then back to some locked doors where you get to prepare a little, before bashing open a lock on a door to explore more and repeat. Add to that The Gloom you have to deal with, which is a constant threat needing you to light the way with various tools like lighters and matches or you’ll take damage when you go to rest. There’s a surprising amount of features baked in here to keep you thinking.
Having two different decks is also something quite different about it. One is your combat deck filled with your weapons, sauces, food and other tricks to get you through; the other is the exploration deck with shovels, lighters and all sorts you can use to help you at rest stops – like setting down a rat trap to catch a tasty little treat, or to dig up something special.
See the Early Access trailer below:
- Use the Explore deck to reveal, search, break, unlock, ignite, feed, and fix as you head even deeper into the game’s dark, dangerous, and oddly musty dungeons.
- Use the Combat deck to hack, slash, roast, and eat the myco-monstrosities that stand between you and the mysterious underground realm known as The Gloom.
- Hand-drawn art collides with rich 3D spaces, dragging you screaming into a surreal, visually striking world of mushrooms and madness.
- Grow and modify your cards infinitely, transforming low level starting cards into powerful attacks, or rare cards into game-breaking superweapons.
- Skewer, season, and roast fallen fungal enemies, eating them to restore health or tossing them into a pot and brewing up game-changing soups.
- Hundreds of cards, deep meta progression, and scores of unique enemies spread across a dense network of caves and tunnels.
For the initial release it has 2 separate dungeon paths to reach The Gloom with entirely different card pools. There’s 5 playable characters, various quests to unlock more stuff and they have plans to continually expand the game with more cards, enemies, dungeons and so on.
Played on Fedora KDE 44 with Proton 11 – absolutely no problems to report on a technical level. Looks great, and it performs perfectly. There’s no real graphical settings to tweak though other than ambient occlusion, chromatic aberration and exposure but I can’t really see any system struggling to play this.
As usual – no official firm thoughts or scored review because it’s in Early Access and not finished. But once again, I’m going to say that it’s worth grabbing right now because it looks so awesome, and could easily end up being one of my most-played dungeon crawlers.
So far it’s very safe to say that Shroom and Gloom has my mouth watering for more. A total feast for the eyes and for your brain to see what you can find.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.