Shroom and Gloom is an innovative roguelike deckbuilder unlike any you’ve seen or played before. Here, you’re managing two decks at once: One for combat and the other for exploration. We spoke to the devs to unearth how the intoxicating loop got its start.
It’s 2025. By now, you’ve likely played your fair share of roguelike deckbuilders. From Slay the Spire to Monster Train, these massively popular titles can keep you glued to the screen for quite literally hundreds of hours. Seriously, no one talk to me about my Balatro Platinum Trophy grind.
Given the immense number of variables, it’s all but mathematically impossible to have an identical run in any of these games. Be it the enemies you encounter, the cards you collect, or the path you take, it all combines to make for an incalculable number of gameplay experiences.
If you thought that wasn’t enough, well, now you’re in for something even more alluring. Shroom and Gloom is upping the ante by giving you two decks to manage concurrently. If our time with the demo and our chat with the devs is anything to go by, it’s already shaping up to sap countless hours of our lives.
What is Shroom and Gloom?
Team Lazarbeam, the devs behind Wrestling with Emotions, brainstormed a unique way to evolve the roguelike deckbuilding space. What’s better than one deck, you ask? Two decks, of course. Well, actually, the original pitch had three, but that’s fine; sometimes more isn’t merrier. Two is the magic number here.
One deck is for fighting against mushroom-based enemies. The second is to help navigate through the perilous caves in which you find them. Before long, you’re having to make crucial decisions like ‘Do I really need to eat, or should I grab this other dagger instead?’
With each passing room, both decks can grow to provide new options both in combat and while exploring from a first-person perspective. How both halves complement each other is where the game truly shines, however. What you find out in the world while using the tools in your exploratory deck can directly benefit your grit in a boss fight.
There’s a lot to wrap your head around, and that’s why we had to sit down with Ben Rausch from Team Lazarbeam to learn all about the addictive indie project.
What the devs say about it
Where the idea came from
“The project started life at a game jam. The concept came up between me and Evan from Team LazerBeam. We were brainstorming what it could be.
“The two-decks idea was there from the get-go. Actually, there were three decks in the original idea. You’d be collecting treasure, and that would be a third deck. We ended up binning that, mostly for time reasons, to try and make it manageable in the jam.
When even just opening locks revolved around cards, it’s safe to say the pool is rather deep.
“The convention is that you have card-based combat, then in between that, you have an exploration phase. We were like, no, what if that decision-making was all card-driven? What if everything was a card? That gave us this idea of setting up a second deck. That was there before we wrote a line of code.”
Chaos of managing two decks
“It does get silly. We have these ambitions of trying to simplify things, but it’s also a very maximalist game. We have some questionable design choices. Why do we need a hand size? Just keep adding cards to your hand!
“We just keep adding rules. It gets pretty wild. But we can’t push it too far to the point the player is paralyzed by how crazy it is. The goal is to land in the sweet spot where you can still hold everything in your head and know what you want to do.”
Creating new cards
“Numbers-wise, gosh, we haven’t taken stock in a while. At least what’s in the demo, I reckon we’re at a good 150 cards.
“We tend to look at the end fantasy we want to give a player. Let’s say you’re all about cooking and you’ve got to defeat the final boss by releasing this incredibly angry, destructive, nuclear burp. We have this idea, but what are the pieces we need to build up to allowing the player that experience?
Things can get pretty hairy in combat if your deck isn’t up to snuff.
“There’s that mechanical end goal, and the thematic end goal. The two work side by side. We’ll tend to blast out a whole bunch of ideas and not look at them as separate, but to try and see a sort of throughline. ‘If we do this, that could open the opportunity for these two other potential synergies. This would actually not work with that, but these two can be flipped to work together as a positive if you have this.’
“Basically just go wide initially, end up with an unreasonably long list of cards, then start pruning from there. How the card is framed needs to immediately make sense to the player.”
A delightfully grotesque soundscape
“Audio is central within the experience. Sound has always been a cornerstone of our games. We used to make tiny little punk games that would be visually janky, the code would be janky, the mechanics would be janky, but the sound would always give it a grounding and emotional space.
“We put a lot of intention into the emotional and ‘thinky’ space it puts the player in. 95% of other composers, looking at something like Shroom and Gloom, would have gone with something really dramatic. We wanted something that doesn’t feel overly taxing to the player, but something to still provide those feelings of dread, mystery, and wonder, but do it in a sparse, ambient way.
“We’re trying to give people something they’ve never been given before. We hope players say, ‘I’ve never heard a game that really sounds like this.’”
A demo that’s effectively a full game
“We gave ourselves three months to see what we could come up with and then put that in front of people. What this demo is, is a much more polished version of what we were able to get done for that prototype. Right off the bat, it went down very well. People were like, ‘This could be on Steam, you could ask for money for this!’
“There’s definitely a lot of rough edges, but there’s a lot of content here. If you dig into it, there are many hours of gameplay. To unlock everything in the demo, you’d need eight successful runs.
“But what it represents in terms of scale, of where we’re hoping to take this, is probably around 20%. We’re about a third of the way through on our end, so still a long way to go.”
The demo, as expansive as it may be, is just the foundation for what’s the come.
While you wait for the finished product to arrive at an undetermined point in the future, you can dive into the Shroom and Gloom demo here.
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