REVIEW

Mushroom 11 Review

by Sam Foxall, October 15th, 2015

There aren’t enough fungal protagonists in games. Besides Toad, who’s only had one solo adventure to his name, fungi don’t get much love as potential main characters in games. Untame’s Mushroom 11 hopes to redress the balance, casting you as a replicating green fungal growth, who must go on a grand voyage of self-discovery to learn that the true meaning of life is growing your mind, not just your body mass. I made up the voyage bit but you do play as a big green mushroom, honest.

You may think traversal is hard for an organism that is usually rooted to the ground. Well, the developers of Mushroom 11 thought of this, and have players manipulating the growth of said mushroom through a shining marker, which can selectively delete areas of the mushroom which cause it to grow in certain directions. It sounds difficult to wrap your head round at first but once you’ve played about a minute of Mushroom 11, the mechanic will feel completely natural. Rapidly erasing your big green friend will cause it to undulate quickly across flat land, while you’ll sometimes have to very carefully delete certain sections of the fungus, in order to get it to grow into a specific hole or crevice. You can switch between a large cursor, which is controlled with the left mouse button and helps for fast traversal or the right mouse button, which creates a small deletion area for culling micro sections of the mushroom to make other areas grow in a specific way. It is hard to exactly describe the mechanic but simply play for 5 minutes and it will all click. By level 4, you’ll be attuned to switching between cursor types in order to make your fungus fit into a crane in order to be hoisted over a lava pit or to cut yourself in half to weigh down one end of a seesaw to launch yourself over some electrical wires.

Life for a mushroom is hard in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Even though your only purpose in life is to devour and grow, there are quite a few obstacles that will bring your rampage of constant consumption to an end. You’ll be evading lava pits, pools of pesticide, electrical wires, missiles, bombs and even the occasional mutant pig-prawn in a weaponised hamster ball. You did read that correctly, just roll with it. Contending with the bombed out landscape is tough too, as you have to squeeze your fungal form into small passageways or shape yourself into a ramp so an explosive charge can bounce off you and roll up a wall. Some of the puzzles in Mushroom 11 are incredibly creative and thanks to the intuitive nature of the erase and grow mechanic, you’ll be able to figure out what to do with no problems at all. The only problem is actually getting the fungus to grow in the direction you want.

The mushroom must have consumed some radioactive spider on its travels.

When you are dealing with bigger obstacles like scaling a cliff face or crossing a ravine, it’s simple to shape your body to solve the task. You’ll either have to transform yourself into a long pillar in order to cross a gap, then quickly rub yourself out so you start growing on the correct side, or create a safe little hook to make some grip to continue your climb up some machinery or a rock wall. The main problem is where puzzle success relies on the game’s physics engine, which will probably lead to 20 minutes of frustration where you just want to feed your computer to the fungus. More often than not, you’ll get to a seesaw puzzle or a momentum puzzle, where you’ll know exactly what you have to do but due to the fickle physics and the difficulty doing precision edits to the mushroom, you can be stuck at a puzzle for ages until you luck your way past the physics section and are able to quickly erase yourself up the last section to get to the next checkpoint. Almost all of my anger with Mushroom 11 has come from physics puzzle sections, where I’ve had to balance precision platforming with managing to drop a weight or fling a certain section of my organism at high speed.

You will notice the peaks and troughs in puzzle quality, as you’ll get a tough but fair climbing section, followed by some terrible momentum puzzle which will take up to 15 minutes to get right even though you know the solution. Luckily, standout moments like the Donkey Kong Country-esque minecart ride through an underground cavern will make you forget those 20 minutes you spent trying to open a door by speed turning a bolt by contorting yourself into a specific shape then flinging yourself across the room before the door closes. The end of level bosses strike the correct balance between fun and challenging and can range from flinging bombs into a mutant pot plant or breaking into the previously mentioned pig-prawn hamster ball by eating drill bits.

I was expecting to fight some horrific fungal-simian hybrid at the end of this section.

The environments you go through may not be the most varied, being mostly differentiated versions of ruined industrial land or overgrown cavern, they all look equally messed up by all sorts of fungal or mutated creatures. There is some kind of story to the whole mushroom quest, told through billboards in the background or pieces of environmental art but you aren’t honestly here for ethical quandaries about GMOs, you’re here to solve puzzles as an all-consuming blob. The music is nothing to write home about though, being comprised of creepy ambient tracks and the occasional high energy piece for a boss fight. I recommend putting on The Blob theme song on a continuous loop while playing. It actually makes it seem like the fungus is on some jolly adventure to find some new friends.

If you are in the market for a creative puzzle platformer, you can’t go wrong with Mushroom 11. The main mechanic will grow on you incredibly quickly and ask you why no-one has ever made this type of platformer before. Aggravating physics puzzles and a paltry 7 chapters stop Mushroom 11 from being a must buy but any puzzle fan should certainly pick this one up.