Shroom and Gloom

Two decks, one gloomy world

Shroom and Gloom starts from a structural idea most deckbuilders don't touch: instead of one deck doing everything, players manage two entirely separate ones. An exploration deck handles movement through The Gloom's hand-drawn dungeons — cards like a shovel to dig through obstacles or a key to open locked doors and chests — while a combat deck takes over the moment a fight starts, built from a completely different card pool tuned for damage, combos, and survival. Reviewers consistently reach for Slay the Spire as the nearest comparison point, since the deckbuilding fundamentals (draft, thin, specialize) will feel immediately familiar to anyone who's played that genre staple, but just as consistently insist the two-deck split makes the moment-to-moment feel distinct rather than derivative. One reviewer put it succinctly: navigating rooms with one deck and then switching decks entirely for combat is close enough to nothing else on the market that "the closest I can think of is Slay the Spire but with rooms you can explore and use cards" reads less like faint praise and more like reviewers genuinely struggling to find a better comparison.

The tone matches the mechanical strangeness. This is a "surreal world of mushrooms and madness," in the studio's own words, and the hand-drawn 2D art colliding with fully modeled 3D dungeon spaces is the single most repeated praise point across the review corpus — multiple reviewers specifically call out the art direction as the reason they wishlisted the game well before release, and the visual identity holds up as the thing that gets mentioned first even in otherwise critical reviews.

Grow your cards, eat your enemies

Where the combat deck earns its keep is in two connected systems: infinite card growth and a health economy built around eating rather than blocking. Cards aren't simply collected and discarded when they're outclassed — they can be grown and modified indefinitely, letting a low-level starting card evolve into a devastating late-run weapon if a player commits to investing in it. That specialization pressure is real: reviewers report that greedily picking up every new card on offer backfires, since low-value base cards clog a deck's draw pile and crowd out room for the specialized combos the growth system rewards. The health system reinforces the same theme. Rather than blocking incoming damage with shields, Shroom and Gloom wants players roasting, seasoning, and skewering enemies, then eating the results to restore lost health — cook a roasted enemy into a soup for an even bigger payoff. It's a small reframing of a familiar genre mechanic, but reviewers describe it as meaningfully changing how a fight is approached, since the incentive shifts from turtling defensively to aggressively finishing enemies off for the health return.

That combination — two decks, infinite card growth, and an eat-to-heal loop — is producing the kind of "I've never played anything quite like this" reaction that's rare for a genre as saturated as roguelike deckbuilders currently are. Several reviewers explicitly mention having sunk 100+ hours into the pre-release demo and beta alone, which is a meaningfully strong signal about the game's hook independent of the newer, smaller Early Access review sample.

The rough edges that come with Early Access

The most detailed critical review in the corpus focuses entirely on quality-of-life gaps rather than the core design, and it's worth taking seriously precisely because it's so specific. There is currently no key remapping and no visible list of keyboard shortcuts beyond spacebar to end a turn; cards can only be played by dragging and dropping them, with no click-to-play alternative for players who find drag-and-drop clumsy in a fast-paced card game. Object interactions require hovering to reveal available actions rather than any clearer visual cue, and while the game has a well-built tooltip system for explaining mechanics, that system doesn't extend to extra cards offered as rewards, leaving players to guess at what they're picking. Enemy damage indicators can stack and overflow off-screen when a cursor is hovering over the player's hand, and a permanent blur effect on the edges of the frame has no setting to disable. None of this points to a design problem — it's the accumulated friction of software still being built, and Devolver's Early Access track record with other titles suggests these are the kinds of issues that get addressed over a patch cycle rather than left to rot. A smaller number of reviewers also report specific bugs, including one case of a character uncontrollably auto-walking backwards, and one reviewer notes the game is surprisingly demanding on hardware for its visual style, to the point of overheating a laptop during normal play.

Final verdict

Shroom and Gloom is doing something genuinely uncommon in a genre that's had a hard time finding new angles since Slay the Spire redefined it: a two-deck structure that changes the feel of both exploration and combat, a card-growth system that rewards deliberate specialization, and a distinctive hand-drawn art style that's winning reviewers over before they've even finished a run. The Early Access rough edges — missing key remapping, drag-and-drop-only card play, incomplete tooltips, and a handful of specific bugs — are real and worth knowing about going in, but they read as fixable software problems rather than flaws in the underlying idea. For deckbuilder fans hungry for something structurally different rather than another reskin of a familiar formula, this is already worth the price of entry; players who are sensitive to control friction may want to wait for a patch or two before diving in.