Team Lazerbeam's hand-drawn fungal freakshow hits Steam Early Access this week, and the punk mushroom vibes are already cooking up Steam wishlists like it's going out of style. Shroom and Gloom drops September 10 with its wild dual-deck setup—one deck for crawling through moody mycelium tunnels, the other for roasting grotesque graycaps into edible loot. The Cape Town dev crew started this as a seven-day FPS jam back in 2021, evolved it through clay models, real mushroom photography, and three-color hand-drawn madness, then locked in Devolver Digital for the push. Demo's been sitting at over 100K downloads and 150K+ wishlists, proving players are starving for something that looks nothing like another Spire clone. The art isn't just cute and gross—it's the whole point, turning every enemy into a potential soup ingredient and every run into pure card-chaos fuel.
Polygon's deep dive with artist Ben Rausch spills how the team skipped the usual digital shortcuts for actual clay sculptures and mycology books, nailing proportions so monsters don't topple in their 3D world. They kept the vision pure: everything that can be a card becomes a card, from exploration moves like igniting torches or feeding cave creatures to combat combos that grow low-tier attacks into game-breaking superweapons. No third deck like the jam prototype—time constraints chopped that—but the explore/combat split and infinite upgrades are the fresh hook in a genre drowning in copycats. Devolver's backing means it won't vanish after a month, and the 12-24 month Early Access window lets them add new pathways, characters, and quests based on what the demo crowd screamed for.
X is already lighting up with streamers slotting it into schedules and folks hyped for the Sept 10 drop alongside Wardogs and other weird indies. Reddit threads from the prototype days show players logging 60+ hours in the demo, begging for the full thing, and the dev team straight-up credits Cape Town meetups for unsticking design decisions. This isn't just another roguelike—it's mycelium madness with a band aesthetic and zero shame about being weird as hell. If the hand-drawn dungeons slap as hard as the previews promise, this could be the breakout indie the genre's been missing since the Spire sequel hogged the charts.
L + ratio to every boring deckbuilder riding Spire's coattails—Shroom and Gloom is the one actually bringing the fungus among us.
