There are a lot of things mushrooms aren’t known for, some more so than others. For example, their great mobility and combat prowess aren’t particularly renowned, and despite all gaming evidence to the contrary they really aren’t that bouncy. The mushroom in Lone Fungus, on the other hand, is all of these things and more, being an ambulatory creature with a sword and a huge number of ways to use it. Lone Funguslaunched on Kickstartera few days ago and has a demo to go with it, and it’s a tantalizing look at a Metroidvania that uses its abilities more on platforming than combat.
Not that the game isn’t combat focused, of course. The mushroom Greencap’s jump has a fairly decent range and reasonable height but it’s nothing like the multiple-character-height vertical lift that some platformers have. Instead its aerial play comes from using the sword to bounce off level props such as spikes or “mushmover” targets. Those targets are scattered all over the world, with the standard ones glowing green indicating they’re charged and ready to use. Once struck they send Greencap flying, either a little or a lot depending on the type hit, and the trick to finding Lone Fungus' secrets is to chain these together to get to places that are only barely in reach.
At the start of the demo, though, Greencap has almost no abilities to speak of. Standard jump, no sword, and a handful of enemies patrolling the caves. Once it gets the sword, though, Greencap gains a lot of power all at once. Hitting enemies is always nice, of course, but being able to pogo off the spikes simplifies things immensely. The sword strike also means Greencap can now regenerate magic, used primarily for healing in this demo but with more uses promised for later. Each hit of the sword gains a few magic points back, which comes in especially useful in the two boss fights. It doesn’t help that the heal spell takes a second to activate and you need to stand perfectly still to use it, but after a few deaths and retries the safe moments in the boss attacks become clear. Once the demo’s two bosses are cleared it’s easy enough to make a bee-line to the exit, but that would miss the extra relics granting new perks that need you put put the platforming skills through their paces.
There are seven relics in the demo and finding them isn’t simple. Several require using the down-thrust to bounce off projectiles with just the right timing, and others require hitting a series of boosts while being careful not to hit too soon to avoid crashing into the spiked ceiling. How that difficulty will be reflected in the final game is still a good question, though, because this is a very early demo and Greencap doesn’t yet have a good number of its eventual planned-on skills. A lot of these challenges seem like they’d be much easier with a dash or spin-jump, and with the open design of a Metroidvania it can be tricky to know if you’ve got the intended skill-set yet or if it’s supposed to wait for a later ability.
For the current skill-set, though, Lone Fungus feels incredibly solid in its design, with responsive controls that do exactly what they should. This is aided by a helpful approach to the controls, such as having the down-thrust ability be used either by pushing down and attack mid-air or by holding the left shoulder button and pressing attack. There are also accessibility modes that trim the edge off the challenge if you’re just not that into the kind of high-precision platforming the standard difficulty level requires. Whether you play it standard, with helpful assists turned on, or go to town on Nightmare mode, the Lone Fungus demo has a ton of promise and showsa Kickstarterthat deserves a look.
