Mushroom 11 (PC) Second Opinion Review

The actual gameplay of Mushroom 11 is difficult to describe, but it involves using the mouse to move an amorphous blob through the stages by erasing and pushing it along. It's deceptively simple, and very easy to get used to, but also nuanced enough that mastering the controls alone won't get players through the many puzzles that lie in wait. Such complicated efforts as manoeuvring the gelatine into a rod-like pile and tipping it over to form a bridge that must be quickly erased while capturing momentum on the other side are common, and it never gets easy to do.

At the end of each obstacle-riddled stage is a boss fight that is, itself, a puzzle needing to be solved, but the difficulty of the end-of-level monster doesn't always correspond to the hardships faced in reaching it—sometimes a nightmarish stage is capped off by an easily-solved boss, while a simple stage may culminate in a frustrating endeavour. That said, it's a puzzle game, so the strengths and weaknesses of individual players determine which complications are the easiest to overcome - an anomaly also true of Blek.

The graphical style is reminiscent of the cut-scenes used in Alice: Madness Returns, and seem like multiple layers of paper-thin objects and background elements. It works very well, and there's never any confusion about what is and isn't in the foreground, while hazards and bonuses are clearly identified by colour (usually red for hazards and purple for bonuses). It's a nice, subtle way of conveying things, and frees the player's mind for figuring out the puzzles.

That said, most of the puzzles aren't really difficult as much as they are slow, since all of them involve figuring out how to move the blob (is the blob supposed to be the eponymous mushroom?) through a tunnel, across a pit, up a cliff, or something similar. The solution for doing it is almost always obvious, and the only problem is applying it, which often requires little more than slowing down and patiently executing the plan.

The physics are programmed very well, and lend themselves well to the gameplay. Learning how it functions is tantamount to the experience because of how the puzzles are designed. It all works very well, and clearly a great deal of thought was put into providing a cohesive experience. There is a steady onslaught of new obstacles to overcome that likely will only be seen once, though the lessons learned in figuring them out can usually be extrapolated and applied to future situations, which means each nuance discovered can become the critical piece of solving a later puzzle, also adding to the cohesion.