Team Lazerbeam and Devolver Digital have confirmed that Shroom and Gloom will enter Steam Early Access on September 10. A playable demo is already available for anyone curious about its unusual mix of first-person dungeon crawling, deck-building, and mushroom-based cooking.
The roguelite sends adventurers through a network of hand-drawn underground environments inhabited by hostile fungal creatures. Progress revolves around two separate card decks, each dedicated to a different side of the expedition.
The Explore deck handles interactions outside combat. Its cards can reveal paths, search suspicious areas, break obstacles, unlock passages, start fires, feed creatures, or repair objects. The Combat deck, meanwhile, contains the attacks and abilities needed to cut through the monsters guarding the route toward a mysterious region known as The Gloom.
Defeated enemies also serve a practical purpose. Fungal creatures can be skewered, seasoned, and roasted before being eaten to recover health. Alternatively, their remains can be added to a cooking pot to prepare soups with potentially run-altering effects.
Cards can be upgraded repeatedly throughout an expedition, allowing even modest starting actions to develop into powerful tools. Rare discoveries can be pushed even further, opening the door to increasingly destructive combinations and highly specialized builds.
Visually, Shroom and Gloom places illustrated characters, cards, and creatures inside three-dimensional spaces. Its intentionally strange presentation matches a world filled with oversized mushrooms, unsettling monsters, and improvised meals made from whatever just tried to kill you.
The Early Access version is set to include hundreds of cards, persistent progression between runs, numerous enemy types, and a branching collection of caves and tunnels to investigate. Team Lazerbeam has also published a new developer diary with additional details about the game’s design.
Shroom and Gloom launches in Steam Early Access for PC on September 10. Its free demo can be downloaded now.
