Shroom and Gloom Review: Two Decks, One Very Hungry Dungeon

What it is

Shroom and Gloom is a first-person roguelike deckbuilder from Team Lazerbeam, a small studio from Cape Town, published by Devolver Digital. It began life as a seven-day game jam prototype back in 2021, got a Steam demo in 2025, and entered Steam Early Access on September 10, 2026 for 14.99 dollars. It is on PC only for now, and a free demo is still up on Steam.

I know what you are thinking: another Slay the Spire child. I thought so too. I was wrong.

How it plays

The hook is what the developers call double deckbuilding. You carry two decks. The Combat Deck is what you expect - attacks, blocks, nasty synergies. The Explore Deck is the new idea: maps, lockpicks, campfires and tools that you play on the dungeon itself to open doors, smash barriers and uncover side paths. Walking through the fungal underworld in first person, you are constantly deciding whether to spend an explore card on a locked room now or save it for whatever is deeper.

That changes the rhythm of the whole genre. In most deckbuilders the map is a menu between fights. Here the space between fights is a second game, and a greedy Explore Deck can wreck a run just as surely as a bloated combat one.

Then there is the cooking. Enemies are mushrooms, and mushrooms are food. You stab, season, skewer and roast them, then eat them for bonuses - or combine several foes into a soup with stronger effects. Setting up a fight so that the right enemies end up in the same pot is the kind of silly, clever optimisation puzzle that kept me saying one more run well past midnight.

The highs

The hand-drawn art is grotesque and charming at the same time, and the sparse, uneasy soundtrack gives the caves real atmosphere - rare for a card game. Card upgrades branch into properly different variants, and rare cards act like weapons that redefine a run. Five playable characters, each with their own card pool, already feel distinct.

The lows

It is early access, and the content ceiling arrives sooner than I would like. There are two routes down to The Gloom, and after a dozen or so hours you will recognise rooms and enemy groups. Balance is uneven: some soup builds trivialise fights while a couple of characters feel underpowered next to the rest. The Explore Deck is brilliant but under-explained, and my first runs died to confusion rather than difficulty. More dungeons, enemies and cards are promised during early access - promised is the key word, so judge what is there today.

Price and who it's for

What is there today is easily worth 14.99 dollars. In our region, where a new AAA release now costs four to five times that, this is a very easy recommendation for anyone who likes deckbuilders. If you are unsure, the demo costs nothing. If you burn out on unfinished games, wishlist it and wait for 1.0.

Verdict

The first deckbuilder in years that made me relearn the genre instead of reusing old habits. Unfinished, a bit wobbly, and already more inventive than most finished games.

Score: 8/10

Image: Andrey Nagaycev / CC BY-SA 3.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dark_forest._Mushrooms._-_panoramio.jpg