Shroom and Gloom

Shroom and Gloom is a first-person card strategy game where players build their decks to explore fungal dungeons. You'll encounter various adventures and treasures, as well as a variety of enemies. Players must skillfully utilize their cards to defeat foes, allowing their cards to grow and improve their attributes. Even if you lose health, don't worry, the game features a cooking function; cook enemies using various methods and consume them to restore your health. The game is constantly being updated, maintaining and fixing bugs while introducing more new cards and gameplay features. Stay tuned!

Features of Shroom and Gloom:

Shroom and Gloom is a first-person, roguelike deckbuilder that brings you mobs of monstrous mushrooms and mountains of mega-combos!Grab your cards to  hack, slash and roast your way through hand drawn dungeons of fungal foes! Build devastating decks, and grow cards into massive abominations as you fight your way into the heart of The Gloom!

Build 2 distinct decks! Use the combat deck to survive fierce battles! Use the explore deck to navigate dungeons, modify your cards, or unlock new weapons and abilities!

Hand-drawn art and animations collide with rich 3D spaces, bringing you into  a surreal world of mushrooms and madness!

Shroom and Gloom offers unique ways for players to grow and modify their cards infinitely. Grow low level starting cards into over-powered attacks, or modify rare cards into game-breaking super-weapons!

Why block your enemies when you could eat them instead! Shroom and Gloom features a bounty of ways for you to season, skewer or roast your foes, then eat them to restore lost health. Better yet, throw your roasted enemies into a pot, and cook up some game-changing soups!

Changelog:

Greetings Shroomers, and welcome to our last dev log for the year! We're wrapping things up with an absolute banger, so strap in and prepare to have your mind blown!

Looking back on 2025:

2025 was an awesome year for Team Lazerbeam, announcing our partnership with Devolver Digital, dropping the Shroom and Gloom demo on Steam, landing an overwhelmingly positive rating, racking up over 140 000 wishlists, and adding 2 awesome new members to our band.

After so many great wins, the way we wrapped things up in December felt like the most epic climax to the the biggest year in our 11 years of making games together!

Turning dreams into reality: Shroom and Gloom Invades Playtopia

Over the past weeks the Beams worked our Lazerbutts off in preparation of an unhinged undertaking; to turn our game's illustrated world into a real life booth and overrun the incredible indie games festival, Playtopia!

We've shown Team Lazerbeam games at every edition of the festival, since Playtopia started back in 2018. For Shroom and Gloom's appearance at Playtopia 2025, we wanted to give people something really special, dreaming up a totally over the top booth that would recreate the hand-drawn, multi-layered art style of our game and bring into the real world.

It's hard to articulate just how difficult it was to realize this vision. Moving Shroom and Gloom from the digital to the physical was a brain-melting undertaking. We teamed up with the amazing fabricator Byron Boshoff, and after weeks of hard work found ourselves standing in an incredible real life mirror of the fungal punk world of our game!

The booth featured a 12 meter tunnel (replicating the mushroom infested levels in our game), leading into a mossy cave with three screens running a brand new expo build of the game. We finished each station off with custom made alternative controllers; giant purple "W" and "End Turn" buttons. Words can't describe how awesome this moment felt. Seeing our world brought to life at the scale was incredible. And it felt so rad seeing people playing in this booth, especially since they were playing something extra special...

New depths: The Facility makes it's public debut!

Along with a polished version of the demo we all know and love, the expo build also featured an option to try out the first act of our second pathway to The Gloom, the recently unveiled sci fi dungeon known as The Facility!

As the public debut of The Facility, it was an awesome moment seeing players exploring new levels, facing news mushie monsters, and slaying them with brand new cards!

These playtesting sessions gave us a bunch of insights into how we can improve on these new parts of the game, but also left us super excited about how much players loved them. We're fully confident that these new play-styles are gonna expand the Shroom and Gloom experience in awesome fashion!

Audience Choice Award: Winning the Meerkat!

The cherry on top of our most sweet Playtopia came as the festival was winding down.

Each year, at the end of the Playtopia conference, an Audience Choice Award is handed to the devs of the most well loved game at the festival. Shaped as an adorable meerkat, and customized by a different guest artist each year, the Playtrophia is an awesome recognition of the game that stole the most hearts in Playtopia's epic exhibition of indie games.

Back in 2024, Shroom and Gloom narrowly lost the Audience Choice award, landing in second place by only 1 vote! This year, we're delighted to share that we manged to clinch first place, bringing a beautiful flaming meerkat into our little studio!

Calling it a year!

If you've made it this far, high fives for your superior attention span! If you've just discovered our game, welcome to the Gloom Patrol! If you've been following our adventures or cheering us on for any extended period of time, thanks for your support and for being a part of our journey to make the world a more radical, playful place.

We're gonna be calling this a year, taking a brief break from work to catch our breaths and return to Shroom and Gloom in 2026, ready to slay!

If you want to keep up with us (or catch up on how we got here) we love sharing our journey on TikTok, Instagram, BlueSky and our monthly mailer! Also, if you're super new to all this, be sure to play the Shroom and Gloom demo (and leave us a review to help us tick over from 97% to 98% positive!).

Thanks once again to every single person that helping to make this dream come true. 2025 was an incredible year for us, and we can't wait to push things even further in 2026. Stay rad everybody!

Player Comments of Shroom and Gloom:

When finding out that a certain game demo got a big update, gets you more excited, and makes you rather play that demo, than any of the newly (and awaited) game titles you just purchased, you know there is something special coming!

Really good game and I hope they add something that lets you upgrade all the cards you have or something to improve your players stats (like if you could upgrade your luck) or be able to change what cards you start with. Highly recommend to literally anyone.

Most deck builders follow a very slay the spire format. You will have attack and defense cards with some tech thrown in. This game has the attack cards but no defense cards. You will find yourself in an all gas no breaks fight to get to the end. How do you keep yourself alive? Two ways of which one is using the exploration mechanic that is essentially the route map from slay the spire. Instead of just picking the spot on the map you travel between zones. During that move you have a completely separate deck that allows you to interact with the dungeon in cool ways to discover items and food to help you. You can upgrade a campsite with stations that provide boons as well. The second method to staying alive is consuming food. You can get it during exploration but you can also cook the very monsters you fight mid combat for food. This balance is a welcome flow that kept me engaged the whole run. I am very excited to see what the final game turns out to be.

Really fun, reminded me of Inscryption. At first I was kind of lost as to which cards to pick/use but after a few runs I got the hang of it thanks to some help. The art style is great, and the music is really fitting for the more tense/important fights in the game. Can't wait to see what the full game turns out to be.

This game is gonna be HUGE upon full release. The developers struck gold with this hybrid dungeon-crawler-meets-survival-deck-builder. The artwork reminds me of the tabletop card game, "Epic Spell Wars of The Battle Wizards"; it's fun, quirky, and very memorable. I've sunk about three hours into the demo and honestly would do it all over again, right up until release. This game can't come out soon enough!

Final words:

Overall, Shroom and Gloom is a must-play rouge-like card game. It has insanely fun combat, made more interesting by the addition of exploration gameplay. It also boasts of a unique aesthetic of hand-drawn maps and enemies. Although, despite its easy-to-learn mechanics, its difficulty level is quite high. You will spend ages trying to defeat the big boss. However, this makes up for the short runtime that the game actually has.