Fungarium

Autumn, 1911. The blight has taken the potatoes, and the village of Lenhollow eats what it finds in the woods.

Your aunt Agnes ran the mushroom counter on Mill Lane for thirty years and never made a mistake. Then she died of a mushroom. Now the counter is yours.

Every day, villagers bring you their baskets. Turn each specimen over under the loupe, cut it open and watch the flesh, smell it, ask where it was picked, and take a spore print. Check Agnes’s field guide. Then bring down the stamp: edible, remedy, refuse, or poison.

One wrong stamp can kill a family. Every basket you refuse is a supper someone goes without.

A COUNTER, A VILLAGE, A WINTER

• Real mushrooms, real lookalikes. Twenty real species, many with a deadly twin, told apart by what mycologists actually check: the gills, the spore print, the sac at the base, how the flesh bruises, the smell.
  

• Kitchen instructions. Some mushrooms are only safe the right way: cooked through, never with ale, peeled, or eaten the same day. Forget to write it on the slip, and you’ll read about it.

• The consequences come later. The village paper reports what your verdicts did, sometimes days afterwards. Send for Doctor Hale in time, and you might still save someone.

• Everyone has a name. A book of people keeps every face at the counter, how they’re eating, and everything they’ve told you. As winter bites, hunger shows on them, and some will beg.

• Feed the hungriest. Forage at dusk before the light goes. Grow the edibles you’ve pressed in crates in your room, and the crop goes to the families who need it most.
  A mystery in the margins. Someone has been writing in Agnes’s guide, in ink that isn’t hers.

COZY, BUT NOT SAFE

Hand-made pixel art in a strict 19-colour palette, a music-box score, weather that changes by the day, full controller support, and six endings. Twenty days. One winter.

Fungarium teaches real identification features, but it is not a foraging guide. Never eat a wild mushroom on a game’s word.