Mycofall Review

A Bullet Heaven That Took The Dice Away

Mycofall, an Early Access bullet heaven from Lazy KodKod Games, launched on Steam on July 21, 2026, priced at $7.99, following a February 2026 Steam playtest. It drops a mushroom-headed protagonist into forest arenas swarming with insects, tasking players with dashing, dodging, and killing their way toward the genre's usual dopamine drip of stat growth, except here the drip is deliberately, defiantly non-random. Where Vampire Survivors and its many descendants build tension out of what the run offers you, Mycofall hands players near-total authorship over their build from the start, letting them define exactly which perks a skill gets and what it targets, rather than fishing for it out of a shuffled pool. Across a small pool of 19 English reviews, "Mixed" on Steam at 63% positive, that single design decision is the fault line the entire community sits on: some players call it the freshest thing they've played in the genre in years, others call it the reason the game has no legs.

The Case For Determinism

The most detailed positive review in the pool makes the strongest argument for what Mycofall is trying to do: "they take the randomness out of what weapons you get, and they strip out a lot of what you realistically don't use in a run, that only exists to give an illusion of choice... it is a great, predictable, skill based, good time, that doesn't waste your time, or force you to endlessly reroll." Several shorter reviews echo the same appeal in blunter terms, calling it "definitely already one of my favorite bulletheaven roguelikes" and praising how quickly a two-hour session hooked a player who normally sticks to turn-based strategy games and board games. For this camp, the mushroom-and-insect setting isn't just window dressing either, it gets singled out repeatedly as "gorgeous," "charming," and "fascinating," with responsive movement and combat that a few reviewers say scales cleanly with character level.

The Case Against It

The counterargument, made just as forcefully, is that removing the reroll removes the reason to keep playing. "No RNG. Sure its not a bad thing having the freedom of choice in picking your skills and so on. But it kinda removes the replay value," wrote one reviewer who otherwise called the game "decent at best." Another was harsher about the genre fit specifically: "The game is literally just about chasing the blue mushrooms which breaks the entire purpose of Bullet Heaven & Roguelike... The progression should almost exclusively come from getting kills." A third reviewer, after listing several specific complaints, landed on a blunter verdict: "Very barebones game. Nothing original here." The irony is that both sides are describing the same mechanic, one calls it clean and skill-based, the other calls it the thing that's killing the game's replay value, and Mycofall's current review split suggests the studio hasn't yet found the framing or the pacing that would let both camps agree.

Collecting Mushrooms Instead Of Killing Bugs

Underneath the RNG debate sits a second, more procedural complaint: the core resource loop itself. Mycelium, the currency that fuels a run's growth, spawns physically on the ground when insects die and has to be walked over to collect, with no pickup radius mentioned by reviewers to soften the task. One reviewer put it plainly: "The main focus of this game feels like its being colllecting the blue mushroom like this was a game like Pacman... it kinda takes away a full focus on the game." That's a meaningful distinction from most bullet heavens, where kills alone drive growth and pickups are incidental, and for a chunk of this pool it reframes combat as a chore standing between the player and the actual objective of chasing loose mushrooms across the arena floor.

Progression That Reviewers Say Doesn't Land

If there's one complaint that unites both the pro- and anti-determinism camps, it's that the moment-to-moment sense of getting stronger is muted. The pool's longest critical review lays it out in detail: "Every upgrade is so small and insignificant that it breeds a level of frustration as it takes far too long to notice improvements. Games succeed in the wake of Vampire Survivor when upgrades and choices improve your character in immediate and identifiable fashion. Mycofall fails miserably in the regard." That same reviewer flags a second structural gap, that reaching an additional skill slot takes far longer than genre peers allow, discouraging the kind of overpowered late-run builds the genre is known for. Meta-progression, the run-to-run permanent unlocks the store page advertises through a currency called Meta Mushrooms, gets a more direct rebuttal from at least one reviewer, who wrote simply: "no metaprogress, refunded." Whether that's a bug, an unlock gate not yet reached, or a genuine absence isn't resolved anywhere in the pool, but the disconnect between the advertised system and at least one reviewer's lived experience of it is notable on its own.

Co-op's Shared-Fate Problem

Mycofall's online co-op for up to four players draws far less attention than the solo loop, but the one detailed account of it raises a real design question. "It has co-op but currency is not shared, which means we are just competing against each other, and if one dies, the game is over. Its just so weird," wrote one reviewer, describing a mode that's ostensibly cooperative but mechanically adversarial and fragile to a single death. Positive reviewers who mention co-op focus more on the social experience of "diving into a life threatening adventure with friends" than on how the systems interact, which leaves the shared-currency complaint standing largely unanswered in this pool. A handful of reviewers also flag technical rough edges, an uncapped-but-unadjustable frame rate, choppy animations at low framerates, and music built around a drum loop that more than one reviewer called headache-inducing well before burnout should reasonably set in.

Verdict

Mycofall's mushroom-collecting, no-RNG spin on the bullet heaven formula is a genuine point of difference in an oversaturated genre, and the pool's most engaged positive reviews make a real case that its deterministic build system rewards mastery in a way randomized peers don't. But nineteen reviews split almost down the middle is a fair reflection of where the game actually stands two months into Early Access: the core combat loop is solid, the setting is distinctive, and the perk system has real depth, yet the resource-collection busywork, the muted sense of growth, and a co-op mode that punishes shared play rather than rewarding it are complaints coming from multiple independent, invested players rather than one bad session. At $7.99 it's a reasonable low-stakes bet on a developer clearly willing to defend an unconventional design choice, but newcomers should go in expecting an unfinished, still-arguing-with-itself Early Access build rather than a settled take on the genre.