Shroom and Gloom: Eat Your Enemies To Stay Alive
Verdict: Play it.
Kill a monster and it comes back as a snack that heals you. Our Shroom and Gloom demo review: a sharp card loop, and an exploration deck that taxes you.
In Shroom and Gloom you do not defeat the Lovecraftian horrors. You eat them. Land a kill with a finisher and the monster comes back as a card called Toasty, and using that card restores your health. So you stop planning for damage. You start planning for killing blows that will refill your health bar before the next room. That one change does more work than it sounds like it should. The demo is free on Steam, and it took one fight for me to stop playing it like a normal deckbuilder. This niche is full of Darkest Dungeon look-alikes that nail the mood and then hand you a stack of stale cards. The map here does not save it either: branching rooms through a dungeon under the ground, nothing you have not walked before. What is different is what happens to the cards. Abilities level up through repeated use, they scale damage on final killing…
Our verdict: A roguelike deckbuilder that turns healing into a puzzle you solve with your killing blows.
