[h2]Difficult To Like or Dislike[/h2]
The concept of Shroom An Gloom is undeniably appealing. The style and the challenge hook you in right away, but as much as I want to love it, I can’t help but notice how unbalanced the game feels in multiple sections.
You spend time building your deck of camping supplies and combat styles, resting, upgrading, and battling your way deeper into the gloom. It all sounds great, but there’s a big problem that crops up again and again, RNG.
Like so many deck builders, Shroom An Gloom gives you a thrilling first run, where everything feels powerful and fresh, even if you end up failing or pulling off a lucky win. But after that, every run starts to look the same. You don’t lose because of bad choices, you lose because the RNG decided that you should, just because.
The heavy reliance on RNG means you’ll often find yourself either stuck with underwhelming cards or, if you’re lucky, stumbling into the best picks right at the start. There’s little room for creative deck building when so much is out of your hands. Even the ability to save scum and try for the perfect card draw highlights how much the experience depends on luck rather than strategy and even that is sometimes RNG. Shroom An Gloom has its charm, but it’s hard to ignore how often it gets in its own way with these balance and randomness issues.
[h2]Issues[/h2]
Oh, boo hoo. You heard the word save scum and probably jumped straight to your own counter-argument.
That’s fine. But as a QA tester, my job, and honestly, my joy, is to push a game’s systems to their limits. I break things, poke holes, and see what’s balanced, what’s broken, and where the experience tips fairly for or against the player.
My biggest gripe with Shroom An Gloom is as mentioned the RNG. Sure, randomness is a staple in roguelikes and deck builders, but hear me out: the way it’s implemented here often makes the game feel more frustrating than fun. Take the very start of a run. Sometimes you'll get lucky, a key and a shovel right out of the gate, letting you open the door and dig up loot for a potentially good start. Other times, you’re stuck with only one, or worse, like using bash to get through because you didn't pull a key. It’s a coin toss whether you get early access to powerful items like the Hungry Dagger or Hot Poker, and the upgrades you need to make them shine are just as random as you enter into your first encounter and first camp grounds.
This can lead to wildly different experiences. Maybe you manage to cobble together a broken combo: a mace that hits for thirty or fifty damage, enchanted to multi-strike, and supported by passives that heal you or ramp up your rage. Suddenly the game becomes a breeze, at least until the stars refuse to align next run. That kind of inbalance means you’re either steamrolling or getting steamrolled, as everything takes a backseat to luck.
After a few runs, I felt like I’d already seen everything the game had to offer. Sometimes I’d draw nothing but food while enemies hit for forty damage on the first or second turn. Since the pathing is linear, I felt the need to take the right path which would net me bonus HP and let me stack up permanent buffs by trimming my deck.
But it always circled back to the same problem: progress depended more on lucky draws than my decisions. That’s what kills the long-term appeal for me.
Lastly the locked camera needs to be unlocked by default along with headbob being disabled, because if you don't you can't see the intent of large bosses by looking upwards or hovering your cursor over them or cards for that matter, they stay hidden unless you right click the cards directly, just some issues we had with the demo which doesn't seem to have been addressed at all, really. Increasing the players PoV or shrinking the size of enemies would easily remedy this concern.
[h2]Save Scum[/h2]
This brings us to the concept of save scumming. When you back out to the menu, then return to the instance, you’ll notice things can change, this isn’t a static experience. You’re drawing random cards both from your deck and from your rewards, so if you want to, you can keep replaying treasure rooms until you get the best cards in the game. This lets players force the ideal setup, giving them a sense of control they might crave, instead of just scraping by with whatever the RNG hands them. You can build the perfect single-target or multi-target weapon, stack vulnerability, seasoning, scaling damage, and multi-strike, which sounds appealing if you’re after power.
Naturally, I tried playing the game straight before testing this method, and I found that while you can save scum for certain things, not everything is open to manipulation. Chests that have to be broken open seem to be the only static reward; everything else, digging, scavenging, and normal encounter rewards, still offers a variety of choices each try, so if you went to enchant a weapon but got nothing special, you can reload and approach it again for a chance at it being one of your powerful rare weapons you've been stockpiling.
So while save scumming does give you more control, it doesn’t completely break the game, but it does highlight just how much luck and manipulation has been cooking into the progression of the players journey.
[h2]Conclusion[/h2]
Should you pick up the game? Well, that's entirely your decision. I would personally wait a bit longer, see if they balance out the builds, add more content and whatever else they have planned, because there are still bugs, glitches and other issues still plaguing the game compared to when we played it during the previous demo.
I do like the game, I just don't feel a sense of desire coming from me to continue outside of trying to put together a very powerful single one shot build using that mace which is dispeportionately overpowered compared to everything else I have so far witnessed.
[h2]Update:[/h2]
I play everything, I have time restrictions so I get the best of what I can out of a game, if it has flaws that I can bypass the 10-15 hour grind for the star run, I will use that to my advantage, talk about it as a flaw in the system work on a review, hope the developers fix said issues.
Here is the blatant problem with the in game builds:
If you get Hot Poker early, then Inferno + Thirsty Mace, it doesn’t feel fun, if you don't it also doesn't feel fun. So you restart to reroll for Hot Poker, dig it up, find the enchantment station, and stack 10+ uses of Hot Poker’s special (making food reusable up to three times, even in shops) which means 5 kebobs isn't 5 currency, it's 15 currency. This means lots of card removals and guaranteed access to your best cards, removing every ounce of RNG and diversity by forcing your deck to shuffle through oils, mushrooms and everything else to empower one single card, which will be used to kill everything quickly and efficiently.
With the mace, I gained +4 energy on kill, so +16 energy for boss fights after clearing their spawned minions. It persists, meaning it never discards, until you end your turn. It's insane.
I’d ask the frog to forget every weapon, buy Mace/Inferno, and just take the most efficient path. The challenge disappears when you only need one of four weapons.
For instance, my last run forced Inferno which I modified to apply +7 Vulnerability, rage, draw/food on kill, so with all the debuffs and rage modifiers with the Spicy Toasty which cost (0) energy and dealt 3-50 damage to all enemies, I was applying AoE from 60 to 660+.
Compare this to someone taking 40 damage in a turn just from missing a damage hand draw, it’s not the player’s fault, it’s a serious imbalance of power here and meta build.
[b]Video Review TBD[/b]
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