Shroom and Gloom gives you two decks and only one of them fights

It is a first-person roguelike deckbuilder set in hand-drawn dungeons full of mushrooms, and the structural idea is in the word double. You build two decks over a run. The combat deck is what you hack, slash and roast with when something fungal is in front of you. The explore deck is everything else — navigating the dungeon, modifying your cards, unlocking new weapons and abilities. They are separate piles with separate jobs, and neither one can be spent on the other’s problems.

That sounds like bookkeeping until you notice what it does to the choices. In a single-deck game every card competes with every other card for the same slot, so the deck slowly converges on whatever wins fights fastest, and exploration becomes a menu you click through between rooms. Two decks means the dungeon gets its own economy. Deciding how to get through the next stretch of The Gloom is a real hand of cards with real bad draws, not a corridor with a door at the end.

The growth system is the other half. Cards do not just get swapped out for better ones — you grow and modify them, so a low-level starter can be built up into an overpowered attack, and a rare card can be pushed into something the game visibly did not plan for. Hundreds of cards, no ceiling stated, and the stated goal is mega-combos rather than a tidy curve. That is a designer choosing spectacle over balance on purpose.

And then there is the defence, which is not defence. The developer’s line is less blocking, more eating. You season, skewer or roast your foes, then eat them to get health back, and roasted enemies can go into a pot to cook up soups that change how the run works. Blocking is a card you play to stay where you are. Eating is a card you play to have won something.

How To Combine Video Game Genres argues that a mash-up only works when each genre has a job to do and both point at one focus. That is a precise description of what the two decks are for. The first-person dungeon crawl is not a skin over a card game and the card game is not a pause menu inside a dungeon crawl — the explore deck is the seam, the place where the cards are the reason you can move at all. If that deck were cosmetic, the whole thing would collapse back into a card game with a corridor screensaver.

The Two Types of Randomness in Game Design is the one that decides whether it feels fair. The essay’s split is whether the dice fall before the player decides or after. A deck is the good kind: the shuffle happens first, you see your hand, and then you choose. Doubling the decks doubles that surface, which is exactly why the growth system matters — modifying cards is how you push back on a shuffle you did not like, and a run with hundreds of cards in it needs that pressure valve or the bad hands start feeling like verdicts.

How Games Do Health is the reason eating is not just a gag. Health is a design tool, and how a game hands it back decides whether players retreat, explore or charge in. Tying healing to killing and cooking an enemy removes the retreat option entirely. You cannot turtle your way to full — the only route back to health is through the thing trying to kill you, which turns every low-health moment into an attack instead of a stall.

Shroom and Gloom is by Team Lazerbeam, published by [Devolver Digital](https://www.devolverdigital.com/games/shroom-and-gloom), listed under Adventure, Indie and Early Access, single-player, coming to Windows and Mac. Hand-drawn art and animation over dozens of 3D spaces is the look, and Early Access is the honest label for a game whose headline feature is infinite card growth — that is a system that needs players hammering on it before anyone knows where it breaks.

The thing to watch is whether the explore deck stays load-bearing. Two decks is a great pitch and a hard build, because the moment the exploration cards stop generating real decisions they become a tax on getting to the next fight. If it holds, this is a deckbuilder where the dungeon is a card problem too.

If the part that appeals is eating your enemies as an actual mechanic rather than a kill animation, Nervemite is the other one on this list — a centipede loose on a space station where the meal is how you learn the level.