Mushroom Musume can be described as a magical mushroom life simulator. The art and music are very soothing, and could be described as “lo-fi”, “1-bit”, and/or “cozy”. You go through a short story-driven character creation process, followed by making choices from random events.

It’s a perfect display size for Android phone, but it has downloads for the PC, Mac, and Linux. The gameplay is mostly text-based, but its always surrounded by art and music. Each play might take you 30-45 minutes; you’ll probably set goals and try to find all the achievements and endings. There are dice rolls you can fail half the time, but it’s not a “reload the game” type of situation. Though Save/Reload is an option! It’s very replayable, so I usually just go hard-core roguelike with no saving.

Very rarely, you’ll encounter a different story-teller, one of whom has a tale that plays like a text-based adventure game + dungeon crawler. There are certainly some hidden surprises in this simulator of a year in the life of a mushroom. Some things are not documented at all… if a choice has a spiral on it, click the spiral to spend some resources on it! Part of the “fun” is figuring out what the recurring symbols on some of the choices mean.

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