Shroom and Gloom is a deckbuilding roguelike that has you growing together 2 different stacks of fungal cards

I love a deckbuilder, me—something about carefully putting together an engine of collapsing game mechanics to run over whatever roguelike challenge awaits me really scratches an itch. Shroom and Gloom intrigues me, because it's asked: What if we scratched two itches?

An upcoming deckbuilding roguelike by Team Lazerbeam, Shroom and Gloom sees you plunging into the depths of a fungal "under-realm" that cannot be safe to breathe in. But hey, some plucky adventurer's gotta do it, and there's cards down there!

The real intrigue is the fact you're putting together two different decks. One for exploration, and one for combat. It's akin to one of my under-appreciated favourite roguelikes, Griftlands. Griftland's not a game I'd call perfect by any means (it very clearly wears the skin of the open-world RPG it was meant to be) but it asked you to build two decks—one for combat, and one for social encounters.

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The way Shroom and Gloom takes that concept and tweaks it from social combat to exploration seems to me a more natural expansion of the genre—transplanting the choices you typically make in, say, Slay the Spire's event rooms and instead making them a part of your hand. Trading in health for bashing down locks, resting up, digging for weapons, and so on.

One thing that also intrigues me is the fact there aren't any block cards—having played the demo (albeit an older version, not the one dropped at the show), Shroom and Gloom is more concerned with stacking max HP and healing items in your deck.

Buying new cards. — (Image credit: Devolver)

You'll inevitably take damage, the question is whether you're grown beefy enough to shrug it off, and whether you can heal it, usually by generating food cards via certain attacks or by applying the "Seasoned" debuff. It's a refreshing take on the genre—and one that incentivises taking more risks.

The exploration deck's interesting, too, essentially dictating what between-room buffs you have access to. For instance, in the demo I've played, you could grab a training dummy to upgrade your cards or a frog statue to forget them—you can also get powerful passives that encourage you to, say, overeat as much as you can to improve your max HP.

Either way, Shroom and Gloom feels like a novel take on a relatively well-done genre and, as of the PC Gaming show, has a new demo available now. You won't have to wait long to play more, as it's launching into early access later this year.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.