HomeNewsMorels: The Hunt
Morels 2 sure has a lot of unicorns, for a mushroom collection gameShitake a look at this
Shitake a look at this
Image credit:Abrams Studios
Image credit:Abrams Studios
The developers explain their thinking in broad strokeson the Steam page. “We loved morel mushroom hunting growing up,” they write. “We still do it every year. One of the greatest things about mushroom hunting is just being out in nature. We take a lot of photos while we are hunting which is how the game came about. We wanted to create an immersive experience of being out in nature, mushroom hunting, and photographing the beautiful environment around you into a game, without having to hunt something with a weapon.”
Being massive lovies, my partner and I havealsobeen mushroom hunting IRL. The great thing about mushroom hunting is that a lot of the mushrooms you can eat look almost exactly like the ones that can kill you - it comes down to counting the spots. We came back from our last fungal foraging expedition with exactly one mushroom - a type of… Auriculariales, I think it was? - which we proceeded to fry to a crisp in terror of being poisoned. I don’t think you can poison yourself in Morels 2, though you do have to worry about realistic weather.
Generally speaking I am bang up for more games about foraging. There’s a quest midway throughGhost Of A Tale- a blend of dark fantasy animal fable and Soulslike level design, with no combat - in which you have to search a crumbling castle exterior for eight species of mushroom, identifying them from hand-written notes and drawings. Ghost Of A Tale is the only game my partner’s watched me play through from start to finish, and the mushroom-hunting was certainly a contributing factor there, though we did also bond over a shared hatred of the “player detected” music.
Anyway, Morels 2 is out right now! I have written about it mostly so I can have semi-related thoughts about mushrooms, as you’ve probably guessed, but it seems to be going down well - evenPCGamerenjoyed it, and you know what they’re like. If you now have mushrooms on the brain, I apologise profusely and would also recommend 1) Earthtongue, which is awonderful vivarium sim, and 2)this cardgame, in which gathering poisonous mushrooms is a cunning means of clearing your hand.
…Belated discovery while inputting this piece: we’ve written about the Morels series before. And how! Back in 2019, Jay Castello (RPS in peace)took her mycologist father on a tour of the original game’s forests.
