Given how popular they are these days, you’ve likely played a roguelike deckbuilder or two some time recently, but have you ever played a double-deckbuilder? No, you haven’t, because they don’t exist. But fake as the term may be, developer Team Lazerbeam and publisher Devolver Digital have just announced one anyway, and a free demo on Steam shows a lot of promise, despite its made-up genre.
We’ve seen a wave of roguelike deckbuilders lately that stray from the basics of games like Slay the Spire, which boosted the genre to one of indie gaming’s biggest trends. Drop Duchy puts deckbuilding mechanics in a Tetris-inspired puzzle game, while Into the Restless Ruins uses cards to build a dungeon rather than engage in combat. The newly announced Shroom and Gloom doesn’t go quite that far, but it still treads plenty of ground that I haven’t seen in a roguelike card game before.
The first twist you’ll notice is that Shroom and Gloom is played in first-person perspective. That’s extremely rare for a card game and while it doesn’t really affect how it’s played, the game’s visual style is still worth calling out. Everything from the game’s environments to its monsters are thick-outlined illustrations, stacked one in front of the other like a series of paper cutouts. That gives the whole game a satisfyingly physical feeling, as its detailed, often quite disgusting drawings form a nice parallax movement effect as you trudge through the dark caverns of its world.
Then there’s the whole “double-deckbuilder” thing. Technically, you build three decks of cards in Shroom and Gloom, but triple-deckbuilder doesn’t have quite the same ring, and one of those decks is a set of passive abilities that you don’t add to often and don’t actually play. The two main decks are combat cards and exploration cards. Everything you do in Shroom and Gloom is based on a card, and the exploration deck includes things like training dummies used to upgrade abilities, a shovel to dig up new weapons, and lockpicks to get through locked doors and chests.
In combat, Shroom and Gloom is a bit more recognizable as a descendent of Slay the Spire, but with some differences that still make it feel unique. For one, you can’t block. There’s a huge emphasis on gaining and losing health, right down to one exploration card that lets you slam your way through doors if you’re out of lockpicks while taking damage in the process.
What really sets Shroom and Gloom’s combat apart is an almost constant churn of cards. You’re constantly creating, modifying, and destroying cards as you play, meaning your deck can look very different at the start of any given round as it does at the end. Several attacks create a food card in your hand if you slay an enemy with them, which stick around until you use them, then disappear. Some cards get stronger every time you defeat an enemy with them, others level up when you eat. Some cards evolve on their own, spawning near variants the more you use them. Others are unplayable, but buff other cards when you deal or take damage.
A lot of deckbuilders encourage you to focus on one specific playstyle for each run, honing your deck down to only those cards that will synergize best with each other. Shroom and Gloom takes a more maximalist approach, stuffing your deck with more cards and more chaos than you know what to do with, and letting you sort out how to survive. That can make it feel unbalanced at times, but it’s just a small slice of an unfinished game, after all. Shroom and Gloom may not reinvent roguelike deckbuilders, but it comes pretty close with its transforming card shenanigans, and it’s a fantastic time either way.
