Mycelium Heaven

Mycelium Heaven is a turn-based puzzle game about a mushroom spreading and devouring everything in its path.
I’ll explain how the game works, however it lets you discover everything yourself through very small levels. So if you intend to play this game anyway, I suggest you stop reading. Though honestly, the game really doesn’t emphasize on rule-discovery.

Each puzzle comes in the form of a grid with cells containing zombies and mushrooms. You can infect any adjacent cell to a mushroom, however you also then need to spread if you want to be able to infect further cells.
These actions cost 1 energy point each exactly, and you start with 3 energy points. Lots of actions are necessary to complete a puzzle, energy depletes very quickly, so you need to eat to replenish it. Fortunately, the forest is full of zombies and corpses that can restore it all.
Consuming zombies is not only a way to gain energy, it’s the main objective as a puzzle is only completed once every single zombie is devoured.

You probably guessed it, you need to infect and then spread on the cell where a zombie/corpse is located to eat it. Which means it costs 2 energy points to gain 3… this game is all about resource management and optimization to get that devouring cycle going.
Most of the mechanics involve moving or turn-based things that make everything nearly impossible to fully anticipate, which also means the game is a lot of trial and error. It’s strategic trial and error though, you can’t be completely sure of what you’re doing, but you’re never trying anything blindly either.
You know you don’t want to waste any energy, and that’s enough to forge a pretty strong intuition.

The difficulty is overall fine, some levels can be hard. The screens get quite big as you progress in the chapters, and some mechanics are confusing.
For example, the third chapter introduces snails that eat mushrooms, but their behavior is a bit weird. They’re supposed to target the nearest mushroom I think, so you can’t always spread as you want and you might need to wait for them to go away. I mean, this mechanic completely makes sense, but it’s annoying and confusing to deal with because each time you try something different, the snails also act differently.

This chapter also introduces “the other mushroom”, which is a mechanic I enjoyed a lot. It’s an enemy mushroom that follows the exact same rules as you and also tries to eat the zombies, so you have to beat the levels as usual while not letting it get a single piece of your food. As you know what the other mushroom wants to do, you also know what to prioritize. It rendered the game more logical and fun to me.

Mycelium Heaven is a good game with interesting mechanics, yet I wouldn’t recommend it to everybody. Despite not being very hard, its trial and error nature and absence of tutorial can make things a bit frustrating and rough, especially for inexperienced puzzle players.
There’s a demo though, so you can always try anyway.

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Developer: 3DGoblinDev
Publisher: Dojo System
Platform: Steam – Windows
Release Date: February 28, 2025