“The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.” – Pablo Picasso
From Super Mario Bros. to The Last of Us, fungi have played supporting roles in video games for decades. Mushroom 11, from husband and wife led indie studio, Untame, takes fungus out of the mildewy background and puts it in the driver’s seat. While we’ve all done more than our fair share of digital ‘shrooms, I guarantee you’ve never been on a trip like this.
Initially conceived during a 2012 Global Game Jam, Mushroom 11 is an exceptionally unique, 2D, puzzle-solving platformer that puts you in the role of an unmoving, amorphous fungal blob. Rather than pushing or pulling the blob, you use the mouse cursor to destroy some of its individual pieces. As the creature is always composed of exactly 132 cells, when some are erased, (as long as at least one cell is touching a surface) they immediately regenerate elsewhere on the organism, thus simulating movement. For a game mechanic so remarkably simple and easy to grasp, what can be accomplish with its versatility is mind-blowing.
When (or more more appropriately, if) you manage to finish Mushroom 11, you’ll find that your blob’s abilities do not change in any way over the course of the game’s 7 stages. Each stage, depending on your skill, can take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour and a half to complete. Instead of leveling up and gaining new abilities, you discover new ways to manipulate the blob while encountering different environmental obstacles. Even if Mushroom 11’s formless fungus had appendages, it wouldn’t hold your hand. The learning curve of Mushroom 11 is well-paced, yet unforgiving. If you don’t pay attention to the lesson each puzzle is trying to teach, you won’t be able figure out how to overcome the next seemingly impossible obstacle.
Much like World of Goo, Mushroom 11 is really all about management, both in structure and balance. While dangling precariously over a pit of acid to reach the next ledge, pay close attention to what cells you delete. Shaving off the cells holding you in place will cause you to plummet to your death. Inversely, letting too many cells grow on one side of your blob will completely change its center of balance, tumbling you in the wrong direction. As long as you remain careful, the random cell regeneration is not a problem until you face a few certain puzzles that require speed. Trying to quickly mold yourself into a particular shape can be immensely frustrating when the cells just don’t want to cooperate.
A nice feature of Mushroom 11 is that it really has no overt narrative. No cutscenes, audio diaries, or walls of text interrupt the gameplay, appropriately leaving its focus on puzzle-solving. Although the background environment can be ignored entirely, I wouldn’t recommend it. The beautifully tragic, hand-painted environments are the biological equivalent to the charming devastation found in Machinarium. Furthermore, these gorgeous works of art provide clues to what happened to humanity and the origin of the mysterious blob. Less of a soundtrack and more of an ambient audioscape, the music provided by The Future Sound of London is mesmeric and apropos of the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Mushroom 11 will not only force you to think outside the box, but it’ll make you climb the box, destroy the box, and form your own box. Much like Portal, it provides players with a refreshingly unique yet elegantly simple tool in order to solve some staggeringly clever puzzles. Rather than reward players with hollow “XP” or new abilities, Mushroom 11 provides an uncomplicated set of rules upfront and nourishes your skill and creativity as a player, a true indicator of superb game design.
Mushroom 11 will be available for PC, Mac and Linux on Steam and GOG on October 15th, National Mushroom Day (yeah, that’s a thing), for $14.99. It’s also coming to iOS in 2016, where it should feel right at home with touch controls.