As anyone who has been following this channel for a while knows, given the abundance of games out there one of the traits that I tend to value is a degree of originality. In particular, given how flat the puzzle genre has a tendency to be, with loads of games that are ultimately swirling around the gravity of the same common idea with different theming, it’s a space that needs some innovation. To Shroomtopia’s credit, I do think that its somewhat unusual multi-level designs accomplish that goal, I just wish that it felt like everything worked a bit more clearly.

Starting out, you do get a reasonably-good tutorial that gets you looped into the basic idea. You’ll have a specific mushroom sitting somewhere, and your goal will be to channel the nectar that’s always present somewhere towards them, activating other smaller mushrooms as you go. When the tutorial was finished I realized though that I hadn’t quite picked up on the objective, thinking more that I needed to get the nectar channeled to the mushroom, not so much that by getting it to the smaller mushrooms in the right way that they’d then spread to the bigger one and complete the level. It’s a critical distinction that I did come to understand, but whether or not I was the problem or the instructions weren’t quite as clear as they could have been is a fair question.

As the stages get further along, the newer complication will be managing different colors of nectar, in some cases needing to mix them, and in others keeping them isolated. Since the game likes to have their paths criss-cross a bit, that does make for a reasonable challenge. I just wish that sometimes it felt like the solutions I landed on were a little more consistently intuitive rather than trial and error. In particular, as nectar flows down to lower levels it can be tough sometimes to accurately predict how things will go, thinking you’d cordoned something off just to see it still get mixed. That isn’t to say you can’t work it out, but I think the trial and error of it was just less satisfying. It has a unique hook to be sure, though a bit repetitive, it just still feels like it could be improved on somehow.