Pals, I’ve formally found one other recreation I can play with my life associate, who regards most video games with monumental suspicion and fatigue. That recreation is Morels: The Hunt 2, launched this week, and as you may guess, it’s about discovering and figuring out numerous species of mushroom in lush, photorealistic wilderness areas. There are additionally unicorns, crystal skulls and robotic elements. Barely confused by the unicorns, crystal skulls and robotic elements, if I am sincere. It feels a bit like builders Abrams Studios are unconvinced as to the favored enchantment of mushroom looking, and have garlanded the idea with random mythology in order to widen the Venn diagram overlap between “fungi followers” and “individuals who wish to reside in cyberpunk Narnia”.
The builders – who’re certainly brothers – clarify their considering in broad strokes on the Steam web page. “We cherished morel mushroom looking rising up,” they write. “We nonetheless do it yearly. One of many best issues about mushroom looking is simply being out in nature. We take a number of photographs whereas we’re looking which is how the sport happened. We wished to create an immersive expertise of being out in nature, mushroom looking, and photographing the gorgeous setting round you right into a recreation, with out having to hunt one thing with a weapon.”
I suppose the mix of pictures and mushroom gathering is sensible, however I proceed to be unsettled by the unicorns. You can too remodel into one of many recreation’s animals in Exploration Mode, by the way in which – I am undecided whether or not this extends to make-believe creatures. I don’t really feel a urgent have to both {photograph} a unicorn or flip into one, however I actually wish to hearth this up and have my associate passenger-seat-drive whereas I am going ferreting round for chantarelles.
Being huge lovies, my associate and I’ve additionally been mushroom looking IRL. The beauty of mushroom looking is that a number of the mushrooms you’ll be able to eat look virtually precisely like those that may kill you – it comes all the way down to counting the spots. We got here again from our final fungal foraging expedition with precisely one mushroom – a sort of… Auriculariales, I believe it was? – which we proceeded to fry to a crisp in terror of being poisoned. I do not assume you’ll be able to poison your self in Morels 2, although you do have to fret about lifelike climate.
Usually talking I’m bang up for extra video games about foraging. There is a quest halfway by Ghost Of A Story – a mix of darkish fantasy animal fable and Soulslike stage design, with no fight – through which you need to search a crumbling citadel exterior for eight species of mushroom, figuring out them from hand-written notes and drawings. Ghost Of A Story is the one recreation my associate’s watched me play by from begin to end, and the mushroom-hunting was actually a contributing issue there, although we did additionally bond over a shared hatred of the “participant detected” music.
Anyway, Morels 2 is out proper now! I’ve written about it principally so I can have semi-related ideas about mushrooms, as you’ve got in all probability guessed, nevertheless it appears to be happening effectively – even PCGamer loved it, and you realize what they’re like. In case you now have mushrooms on the mind, I apologise profusely and would additionally suggest 1) Earthtongue, which is a fantastic vivarium sim, and a pair of) this cardgame, through which gathering toxic mushrooms is a crafty technique of clearing your hand.
…Belated discovery whereas inputting this piece: we have written concerning the Morels collection earlier than. And the way! Again in 2019, Jay Castello (RPS in peace) took her mycologist father on a tour of the unique recreation’s forests.
