▼ Not recommended
39 hrs
A grinding shrooms game is the best way to describe what this game is. Despite it being an Idler, I find myself in a lot of confusion on some of the mechanics, especially what the purpose of spam-clicking the glitters across the board was. A lot of my progress was throuh the guides and tips of other players. The tutorial wasn't the best at being clear on what to do, the purpose of the game besides grow and unlock more fungi.
You get additional features like upgrades and achievements, which is nice, but after unlocking almost all the mushrooms in the game you don't get much past that. It's woeth 40-50 hours total of grinding then I'm moving onto the next game.
For a paid game, Fungiculture should have more than what is presents, with the basic paint-style arts and minimal graphics and effects that can be easily made using Adobe flash.
▲ Recommended
20 hrs
I loooooove little incremental games like this so picking this up wasn't a hard choice, especially for 3$. If it's not an amount you'll miss, and this seems up your alley, pick it up.
However, as with most games I've played from this studio, the progression system isssss.... a LITTLE clunky to say the least. The core mechanics are there to make an enjoyable experience! Fun upgrades that are mostly impactful, some clear guidelines on how to progress, and a way to consistently be engaged. The issue I have comes from the manner of unlocking deeper content in the game!
In Fungiculture, there are a series of biomes of which you can purchase spores from to grow new mushrooms! It's cute, and changes up the aesthetics a bit as you progress... But the issue is, to unlock those areas, you have to essentially discover EVERY mushroom from the previous pack... Including an ANNOYINGLY rare yellow rarity mushroom... I'm talking buying hundreds of spores and not even finding one. And this is MANDATORY for progression!... I don't understand how the main loop is so clean and cute, but this one mechanic forces you to purchase a dozen spores, plant them, and THEN sell them (Cause for whatever reason you can't *not* plant spores you purchase) This one feature sorta takes the whole "casual cute mushroom growing" game and just suddenly forces you to sit down and grind out spores, instead of interracting with ANY of the core loop of the game!
I know it's getting to be an old game that hasn't seen much play, but everything I've seen from this dev seems to have SO much promise but stumbles on little details that seems to make the latter portions of the game fall flat. I really hope to see more, and hopefully some big improvements on these relatively narrow, but very GLARING issues! There's an abundance of ways to make it just a little bit less clunky, and far more enjoyable! Say- if just ONE fewer mushroom needed to be discovered per biome, leaving the yellow rarity for completionists! OR an upgrade that increases the likelyhood of drafting higher rarity mushrooms! Just- anything to not make the progress stop dead in its tracks for that looooooong moment.
An aside, BE CAREFUL with this game, if you plan on investing any real time into it. save and restart regularly. My computer experienced a crash during play and lost HOURS of progress, there are NO auto saves!
