Mushroom 11 review

[Administrator]

For a game that can feel so alien, Mushroom 11's premise is comfortingly familiar. Earth has been wrecked, presumably - in light of the game's title - by some kind of nuclear mishap or extravagance. Humanity's infrastructure - the pipes, the rails, the chimneys, the cranes - stoically gather moss or crumble. Life, or what's left of it, has no time to mourn our passing (besides, why on earth would they, with our damned record?). Still, the death of one species provides opportunity for another. The journey will be difficult but, for the gelatinous blob of bacteria you guide through various scenes of Soviet decay, the truism holds: life always finds a way.
Mushroom 11's gift is not its ghoulish, ambient soundtrack, or the artfully arranged backdrops of demolition - although both of these assets contribute a great deal to the melancholic, yet hopeful ambiance. It is, instead, the primary interaction itself. You control the amorphous blob indirectly, by pushing it along the ground via an erase tool. Hold down the button and, like scrubbing out an image in Photoshop, you rub away the underlying blob. The erased section then regrows on the other side of its mass, shifting it slightly along the ground (imagine a picture editor erasing a magazine cover model's hip, only to find it reappear exotically on her shoulder and you get the general idea). Moving the organism in a particular direction is as simple as erasing its opposite side. Scrub the cursory back and forth quickly and you'll create momentum to this action. This, combined with the lay of the terrain, allows you to cause the blob to roll, climb or teeter. Providing one part of the blob is touching a surface, it will always regrow.
There are just two buttons in Mushroom 11. Both perform the same erase function: one with a large cursor, and one with a small. The smaller cursor allows you to perform more delicate rearrangements of cells to, for example, fashion the blob into a tall column to reach a high place, or into a ramp, to allow an incoming bomb to roll over your back and launch off toward a distant target. The smaller cursor also allows you to split the blob into two parts, which can then be independently controlled. From this tiny palette of interactions, spatial reasoning puzzles grow naturally, requiring you to, for example, hit multiple switches simultaneously, or to squeeze through narrow passages or even rebound from the surface of water in order to bounce onto high ledges.
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