This looks fungi: a first-person roguelike ‘double deckbuilder’ where you use a separate deck for exploring, smash locked doors open with your head, and feast on the corpses of mushroom monsters

With so many roguelike deckbuilders out there, I appreciate when one stands out immediately—and there’s a lot that stands out in Shroom and Gloom, announced today by Devolver Digital.

It’s in first-person perspective, for one, so you don’t see the typical view of your hero on the left side of the screen and bad guys lined up on the right. You hold your cards in front of you, when you look at your map you see it being held in your hand, and between encounters you actually walk through tunnels and passageways to get where you’re going by pressing W. That alone is already a refreshing change.

There’s plenty more, though. Shroom and Gloom is a “double deckbuilder,” meaning you have a deck you use for combat but another completely separate deck you use for exploration through the branching map. Dig up new additions to your deck by playing a shovel card, play a camp card to take a rest, and walk right up to shops to purchase new cards.

And, as I did in the demo, you can build a toad shrine and then lick it to remove a card from your memory (and deck). Plus, if you come to a locked door but you don’t have a key… well, you can just smash it open by headbutting it. I’m not saying it doesn’t hurt: you’ll lose a couple of hitpoints, but at least the door opens.

Where are the shrooms promised in the title? That’s where your enemies come in: they’re all weird lumpy mushroom monsters, gross but also cute. (The art style of Shroom and Gloom is a delight, like if Adventure Time was drawn by R. Crumb.) I started out battling them with some basic cards, like a knife for stabbing and a “roast” card for fire damage. Fatally burning a mushroom would provide me with a “toasty” card, which I could eat to restore my health. Roasted mushrooms? Delicious and healthy.

As I continued through the dungeon I met meaner mushrooms but built a stronger deck. One card let me replenish my HP by taking a bite of an enemy before they were even dead, another card would increase in damage with every kill, and my favorite was a mace that not only dealt a lot of damage but would remain in my hand after a fatality. I did a lot of whomping on some minor mushrooms with that mace, especially after using another card to increase its damage a few times.

The mushrooms did a lot of damage to me, too: developer Team Lazerbeam says “there are no block cards” in Shroom and Gloom. If any enemy attacks you, they’re gonna hit you and hurt you, in other words. In the demo that led to my health plummeting quite a bit in most fights, but there were multiple ways (like chowing down on my spongy enemies) that meant I could regain a ton of health during a fight, too.

I made it to the boss in the demo, though this being a roguelike deckbuilder it naturally had multiple stages and its final form (summoning a bunch of tentacles after taking several big bites out of me) eventually wiped me out. I was prepared for this eventuality: a card I’d collected earlier let me rise from the grave and heal to half my HP, but it still wasn’t enough to triumph.

No matter. I’ll be back soon because the Shroom and Gloom demo is a lot of fun and I’m eager to play through it again. You can find the demo on Steam, and look forward to more when Shroom and Gloom enters early access later this year.