Shroom & Gloom Analysis – The Main Loop (2)
Once I’d torn myself away from actually playing the game and overcame the immense respect for such a tightly presented ‘prototype’, I started to think about this game on a holistic level. What was ‘Shroom & Gloom’? What lay at its core? What did we, as players, do within the game? and how did that resonate with us? I wanted to focus on a brief overview of the game, before diving deeper.
The first point of identification is that this is a ‘deck builder’. The player progresses through the game, find new, upgrading current, and disposing of unneeded/unwanted cards. Each card had different roles, abilities, and upgrade potentials. How the player structured their deck would dictate how each playthrough would go.
The next key parts to ‘Shroom & Gloom’ are the ‘rogue-like’ elements. By definition, this is a ‘dungeon-crawler’ as the player explores dungeons, but we can take this further by observing that:
- Game sessions are based on ‘how far can the player get?’ sentiments and each playthrough, effectively resets the progress (map excluded) of the player.
- The game is, effectively, turn-based in that the player has ‘action points’ and must strategies their attacks and discovery phases.
- The player can alter their stats (increase health, attack….etc).
- The positive gameplay experiences heavily rely on the player finding value in the game systems and not just narrative or aesthetic elements.
We could also see more contemporary thinking in the focus around short play sessions (rogue-like) and focus on replayability. Unlike ‘rogue-lites’ however, ‘Shroom & Gloom’ utilises ‘fixed events’ as markers for progression, allowing the player to have some expectation of what’s to come.
The final point to identify is less developed at this point (read: prototype), however, there are strong hints of an overarching narrative. Similar to ‘Inscryption’, the player is visited by an ‘omnipotent’ being at the end of each play and incentivized (through mocking or praise), to try again.
So there it is; an overly simplified summary of ‘Shroom & Gloom’ that, in no way, does the game justice. However, I’m just getting started and we’ll dive deeper into each aspect of the game with further write-ups.
