AMAROPOSTIA STIPTICA
Back in 2021 I had the pleasure of reviewing Inscryption which was truly a wonderful experience and my review ended up being quoted on Devolver’s website as a review quote to promote the game which was and still is an honor. I don’t think this review is going to garner the same response as I have major issues with this game. Yes, I am fully aware the game is Early Access and therefore unfinished but it is being sold and I was handed a review code so I will do just that because I think the reviews on Steam and other websites are missing major issues with this game and are ultimately doing a disservice to this game in a world where card based videogames are probably at their peak popularity.
Let’s start off with the issue of rogue-like being used in the marketing of this game because it just isn’t. The maps never change; the cards do but that’s simply because shuffling cards is an extremely random event with outcomes that are exponentially large. For example, a standard deck of playing cards has 8.07 × 10⁶⁷ different possible configurations or if we need to see that number fully realized that’s… 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 …possible configurations. That does not make Solitaire a rogue-like. I realize the dungeons don’t change due to the unique art design but crawling through these levels does get tiring after a while because it’s the same experience outside of cards every time and the base set of cards for each character are always the same, the hands change. Yes, there are some random events, but it’s always the same events at the same locations or randomized events to push the player forward from rest areas. It’s not a rogue-like is my point; it seems like one at first but spend enough time and you will see it is not and if that’s what you are looking for you will be disappointed.
MSRP: $14.99
Platforms: PC
Price I’d Pay: $9.99
The next issue is that there’s a lot of cards but the best mechanic is to simply keep powering up cards you start with. Focus only on getting more cards for camping, pay or feed toads to lick them and forget cards you don’t want, and simply power up the cards you start with to do a lot of damage while maintaining healing and you’ll win every fight. I tried this with multiple different characters who do play differently from one another, and the method still works and the other characters outside of the first which is ironically the one I had the most fun with. Every other method of playing the game is just less fun and less successful which means adding cards is not fun which is counterproductive to a card game. Inscryption made new cards feel like a reward, Balatro had me weighing options on changing my strategy mid-game, Shroom and Gloom made me refuse cards because it would only make it harder to draw the cards that would do way more damage with more effects. I tried engaging with more mechanics of this game but why would I when doing so leads to defeat?
And every time I get defeated, I have to sit through the entity that tells you how close you got to the end before being kicked back to the main menu to start again… unless you cheat.
See unlike a reviewer who said they had no issues, I did. After defeating a group of enemies, I was left in combat mode with no one to fight and no way to continue so I exited back to the main menu hoping to see if the battle had been completed and saved. It hadn’t so I had to redo the fight except that made me realize that if I knew I was going to lose a fight I could simply exit out and re-enter my game, so I tried it and it worked. I have no shame because once again, the dungeons never change, only the hands I’m dealt do so why not? If I seem a bit hostile it’s because I am because I tried playing this game the way it seems to want you to but they don’t explain all the mechanics well (they do a good job, but there’s some cards that don’t make clear sense) and not all the mechanics are as fun as others and less fun mechanics should yield better rewards and they don’t so… cheat. Play the game you want to because there’s nothing stopping you. See, earlier this year Vampire Crawlers came out and you can really cheese systems by basically making hands that infinitely loop building up massive combos and the game knows that’s happening and will punish you for it (after giving the player more than enough time to enjoy the power fantasy of course). Shroom and Gloom punishes you for not doing it and it seems like a bit of a failure at understanding what makes card games fun.
See I played a lot of early Yu-Gi-Oh! which in hindsight was rough and really came down to the bigger number wins and Shroom and Gloom is a lot of that. Choose your beat stick and make it more powerful and win, just make sure you don’t die.
Well, that’s combat anyways, the other half of the game is the rest sections where the player can dispel darkness, crush the creeping fungus in the room, light torches, and set up small devices to upgrade cards. These sections are far more interesting and do give the game more identity, but after doing it multiple times it just becomes a chore like combat. It’s always the same rooms too so it’s just fundamentally underwhelming. People complained about revisiting the main temple in The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, they are gonna hate this. I don’t hate it, but I just sort of lost my care after a while and that’s sort of the big issue here; no amount of added content is going to fix this game.
It needs to be rehauled on the card game side of things. Give the players more energy to do actions and change the costs of certain cards, make the areas more random, something. Yes, there’s another area coming which will change up some of the game but it’s not going to change the strategy used to beat it. There’s plenty of really great card games out there that do what Shroom and Gloom is trying to do and do it a lot better.
That being said, Shroom and Gloom is beautiful and uses a very unique way of making its 3D spaces which is why I do comprehend the static nature of its dungeons. Every single tunnel is a series of 2D images layered with enough space between them to make it look like 3D space and it is something you can see in game, the devs are not hiding this fact. Everything is hand crafted; the artwork is sublime. This game looks like nothing else and it’s why I’m likely coming off angrier than I want to be. Even subtle amounts of storytelling is done within the world that they have made and the characters that you play as (The Concerned Parent is no doubt looking for the Paper Boy who is the first character unlocked in the game who has a different set of cards than the parent) are engaging but the gameplay does it no favors and there isn’t enough random events to make playthroughs feel more unique. Food is currency in this game and what if instead of a fight a character appeared and stole your food? The frogs play a big part in this game mechanically but very little story wise? What about the ending that made me think “Oh, okay I get what documentary this is referencing. I see it scarred them too.”? None of this will fix the mechanical issues but would at least make me, the player, more interested in returning over and over to see what different events could occur.
I don’t hate Shroom and Gloom, but I don’t love it. I want to though and that’s what kills me. It’s clear there’s a lot of love poured into this game, but the mechanics seem antisocial in the way they do not want me to engage with them. It’s very hard to recommend this game when it’s in a genre (or genres if we want to call it a rogue-like) where competition is at an all-time high. It’s very pretty but leaves me bitter.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.