Shroomtopia Review - Cute aesthetic and Crisp Puzzle-Solving
Shroomtopia is a mushroom-themed puzzle game with a simple core mechanic: the player erodes soil and moves coloured water across a hexagon-shaped landscape. By extending magical rivers, the player can spread adorable mushroom circles across the landscape and awaken their new anthropomorphised toadstool friends.
The puzzle is only solved once you match the right coloured mushrooms to the right dormant ‘Shroomtopians’. At first, if you have to reanimate Om (the green Shroomtopian) you might be given green magical water from the outset. But in later levels, you are given blue and yellow instead, requiring you to mix the correct result yourself. Before long, you are trying to save multiple Shroomtopians in the one level, each one needing different colours, and you have to be careful not to accidentally turn all of your blue water green, saving Om before you can save Doki (who is blue, both in colour and temperament).
The core game has 75 levels across five different worlds, each of which increases the complexity and difficulty of the puzzles as you progress. You have to start balancing the water levels of your ponds, unleashing beautiful waterfalls at the right time to avoid certain colours overflowing onto their surroundings. Other quirks are introduced, limiting your options and causing different effects to take place.
As you finish each world, you unlock its features and can use them when creating your own levels. Although it doesn’t take too long to finish the 75 core levels, the game comes with an in-built level designer that allows you to build and share new levels online—or play levels created by other users. Hopefully, Shroomtopia will develop an adequate user base to build more levels, extending the game’s replayability.
The music and sound design are pleasant, making it enjoyable enough to listen to the looping track while trying to move beyond the next island. The narrative is less effective; there’s some heavy exposition early on about an earthquake and some justification for why you need to wake up the mushrooms, but honestly, I don’t think the premise needs a detailed explanation. Just let me help the cute mushrooms, I don’t need to know why I’m doing it. The tutorialisation could also be better designed—incorporating in-game prompts rather than text explanations—but it gets the job done.
Overall, despite a few weaknesses, Shroomtopia is a simple puzzle game that feels nice to play, has a cute aesthetic, and would comfortably fill an afternoon if it’s your type of game. Pick up the demo and, if you enjoy the core mechanic, I suspect you will enjoy the full release—plus the user-created levels that I hope will fill the online catalogue in the future.
Shroomtopia was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
