On a distant planet of strange purple, orange, and red hues, problems are festering. Giant, towering problems of all sorts of proportions – twisting, stretching mushroom growths that must be put back in their place. It’s somebody’s job to clean them up – and hey, you’re not busy, right? In Mycopunk, it’s all up to you and your friends.
This upcoming first-person co-op shooter is the debut title from Pigeons at Play, a group of NYU Game Center graduates who banded together after beginning work on the game during their senior capstone project. As the team told GamesHub during a group interview session, networking within the local New York games scene and forming connections with NYU Game Center professors is what motivated and guided the game on its path to securing a publishing deal.
While the project did start as a student work, it was clear there was a novelty in its design, and a compelling hook in its world. So, it began to grow in earnest – eventually catching the attention of Devolver Digital. After a hands-on demo, it’s clear to see why. Mycopunk is a snazzy, snappy little shooter with a neat aesthetic, and very cool ideas about rewarding co-op gameplay.
You begin Mycopunk as one of four characters – the Wrangler, the Bruiser, the Scrapper, or the Glider – each with their own namesake abilities. Travelling alone or with up to three other people, you’ll enter a world in need of saving, defined by a range of missions.
In one mission, you’ll be fighting off lumps of suspicious, mushroom-like growths and subsequently fighting great wads of gunk and enemies comprised of Thing-like strands of flesh. In another mission, you’ll need to deploy a railgun to take down a larger threat, taking on a multi-step course to get the gun running and firing, all while ensuring you make it out alive.
What’s most striking as you enter these missions, first up, is the aesthetic choices. Mycopunk features a cel-shaded world of bright colours, and while its FPS setup does bring Borderlands to mind, its colour palette and design is overall quite different, and uniquely stylish. Lines are thin and precise, and there’s rare detail that gives texture to the game’s many desert plains, giving the world a lovely alien feel.
With its many landscapes being minimalist, Mycopunk‘s starring enemies are given a chance to shine. As you travel, you will almost immediately be assaulted by the game’s many creepy enemies, and they are endearing in their strangeness. Most evolve from hexagonal balls, with these rolling after you in short, bouncy bursts before expanding or exploding. If you don’t shoot them to pieces, they may collide and grow, forming clawed limbs or attaching to nearby organisms, in an explosion of sticky limbs.
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The further you travel, the larger these aliens grow, with some gaining scorpion tails, or laser blasters, or canons, or shield towers. Their transformative nature means there’s always some new combination of limbs to tackle, in fights that are aesthetically (as well as mechanically) compelling. Not only that, but there’s a really cool sense of creepiness in how these creatures advance, with their roiling, flying snappiness making them formidable foes.
These creatures were particularly frightening in the Cleanup Detail mission, as each destroyed blob spawned into a mystery alien – and there was a needed balance between cleaning up muck and taking down creatures. At one point, I was on a roll with blasting away growths, and turned to find an army of android blobs running at my back, claws swinging.
There is some forgiveness as a solo player, with multiple revives aiding your journey, but the game is tough alone, and the aliens you encounter have all sorts of tricks up their strands. You can’t always get away with a combination of running, gunning, and blasting special attacks, even when you’re paying attention to gun recharges (notably, there’s no ammo in this game – using your primary gun recharges your secondary gun, and vice versa).
That’s where co-op gameplay will come in. With friends along to ease the burden of saving the game’s planet, you can smash, glide, and lasso your way to victory, wrangling great beasts and mushroom blooms as a team, crashing through space with style and (some) grace.
While only short in nature, my taster of Mycopunk was rich with flavour. Its aliens feel deliciously weird and strange, and its mission-based structure lends itself well to fights against these roaming hordes. With a unique aesthetic and overall design, it’s hard to put it into a box – the developers cite Dead Space and RimWorld as thematic touch points, and Borderlands is a good visual pointer – but existing on its own is certainly a boon.
In a world packed with multiplayer co-op shooters, there’s plenty of reasons to pay attention to Mycopunk as it heads to Steam Early Access later in 2025.
