Lone Fungus: Melody of Spores review

written 2026-01-03

Lone Fungus: Melody of Spores is the sequel to Lone Fungus, and a metroidvania I played in 2025-12. Like its predecessor, it has difficulty settings and also the option to make a custom one, which I did, taking all the settings from the hardest preset except increasing the enemy hp multiplier from 1.2 to 1.5, to match the boss hp multiplier, and removing the "drop currency on death" mechanic. It took me about 12 hours to finish almost everything.

Lone Fungus review

Core mechanics

First, I was really disappointed to see they adopted an invulnerable dodge as a core mechanic, with no limit or downside and available from the start. I dislike this mechanic in most action games because it de-emphasizes positioning, letting you dodge most attacks through timing alone. Some attacks are also designed to be basically undodgeable without it.

Another core mechanic change, though, is making the player's basic attack 8-directional instead of 4-directional and have a narrower, stab-like hitbox. I like this because it makes aiming more important and makes the game differ in an interesting way from its predecessor. They also changed it so downward hits *don't* give you a bounce, which removes one of my favorite tactics in action platformers, but I recognize there's more than one valid way to make a game, and I'm glad the Lone Fungus devs were willing to experiment by removing this tactic to let the game focus on other things. (they did kinda re-add it in another way, which I'll get to, but I like it for how different it is from the Lone Fungus 1 pogo). Also, the player's weapon is a whip, which is unique from a flavor perspective.

Next, they added the armor mechanic, which works like an unhealable layer on top of your health. This is the opposite of how you want an unhealable health layer to work, and makes it, or upgrading it, pretty useless outside of a no-healing strategy. Also, the amount of damage it blocks per point of armor is inconsistent between enemies for some reason, but it averages about 2, and when you spend an upgrade point (which I'll get to), you're choosing between 2 health or 1 armor, so armor doesn't seem significantly better than health even for a no-healing strategy.

An ability you gain early is the "spore kick", which is like a diagonal pogo that does low damage but makes the next couple whip hits do slightly more. It's not very efficient at increasing your damage, but it is often useful for positional reasons since you can't pogo with the whip, also many bosses and some normal enemies put on shields that make them invulnerable until you spore kick them a couple times. I'm not a fan of this mechanic because it forces a specific tactic, but it's okay.

As for the upgrade system, the game has mostly just one type of findable upgrade item which you can spend on +2 health, +1 armor, +2 mana, strength (+1 whip damage), or "finesse" (+25% damage for throwable weapons and +0.5 damage per spore kick). Finesse makes a much bigger difference for throwables than strength does for the whip, but I'm still not sure how good it is, because spore kicks don't synergize with throwables. They only buff the damage of the next couple whip hits. Also, throwables cost mana, and there aren't many ways to get lots of mana in this game. And one of the best ones is a relic (equippable upgrade) that gives you some when you take damage, which encourages healing strategies, and healing and throwables compete for mana.

My last comment on the upgrade system is that I really like that it lets you reallocate your stats for free (at an NPC you can find early), giving you a chance to try many different extreme builds in one playthrough.

One last comment on the combat system: I think the player's hitstun is too long. It's almost as long as your invulnerability when hit, so often taking contact damage traps you into taking more. This is really annoying. Also, you get knocked back *really* far when you're hit, which often means getting knocked into spikes. You don't often take extra damage from this because your invuln-on-hit covers it, but it does respawn you at the start of the room, which is annoying.

Communication

Sadly, Melody of Spores is way worse about communicating its rules than its predecessor. Most item descriptions say vague things with no quantitative information. Also, most of them are for sale, so you have to commit to them to find out if they're good or if they even do what they say.

Bloat

I also think it's a shame how many different throwable weapons there are. In Lone Fungus 1 there were 10 spells which was a bit wasteful because you'd likely never use most of them, but Melody of Spores has closer to 30 of them, and still you'll never use most of them. Game designers need to focus less on quantity of content and more on quality.

This is also compounded by the economy balance. Unlike most other games, after doing pretty much everything, I didn't have enough money to buy half of what's in the shops, which means even if you want to try all those 30 weapons to see what's best, you'll only be able to afford a few of them.

Enemy and level design

Overall it's mediocre. Most normal enemies either only have contact damage, or are completely stationary and just shoot at the same spots every time, neither kind are very interesting.

They did abandon enemies dropping powerups, which I like. But they made them drop more mana and gave you access to more efficient ways to convert mana to health. So I still feel like, most of the time, even with the difficulty settings I played with, you heal from fighting enemies too quickly, making it too easy to survive.

The few challenging non-boss encounters I had all involved having to fight tanky enemies that have contact damage and move with no telegraph in tight spaces surrounded by hazards, which is as frustrating as it sounds.

When it comes to platforming challenges, they're really easy compared to the predecessor, or maybe I've just gotten that much better at platforming? I found *one* hard platforming challenge except for the astral gates. As for the astral gates, while I didn't do most of them, the few I did revolved entirely around floating objects that move you in a fixed direction, making very railroady, boring gameplay.

As for bosses, most are just okay. They have only 4-ish attacks, which gets a bit repetitive, and often their telegraphs are unintuitive or very subtle, making them unfair for your first couple tries. There are definitely a few good ones though, and the final boss, shockingly, became my favorite boss from *any* game. It's heavy on platforming and all of its attacks create dynamic positioning challenges requiring improvization rather than memorization, and their dangers can overlap, creating a wider range of possibilities. It's also very hard.

Map and exploration features

For some reason, the map has been *severely* downgraded from the previous game. It used to show the actual shape of rooms making them recognizable, but now it shows only square tiles, and moving the camera or cursor is now slow and janky. And for some reason, there are no control hints for zooming on the map. You have to guess buttons until you figure out which ones it is.

On the other hand, they've introduced a quality of life innovation I haven't seen in any other metroidvania yet, and which I really hope becomes more popular. Instead of placing ambiguous markers on the map and having to remember what you meant by them, you can take *screenshots* while in a room, and then those screenshots are visible from the map! This is so much nicer. The game also automatically marks most kinds of temporarily impassible objects and labels which kind they are so you know when to revisit.

Finally, this is the first metroidvania I've seen that lets you teleport from anywhere to any shrine. I saw something like this in one other game before (Islets), but this goes farther, streamlining the process of getting around more. It's really nice.

Story

The story is more substantial than the predecessor, though still not very interesting, it's serviceable.

It's lame that the protagonist is named the same as the protagonist of the first game, even though it's clearly not the same person. His name is "Greencap", and his father's name is "Greenius Capius", no joke. This cringey name conflicts with the serious tone of the story when Greenius Capius dies in the beginning.

I'm also bothered by how male-heavy the cast is. All the 3 most important characters are men, and most of the rest too. Of the few women, I'm also bothered by how one is portrayed, having the most stereotypically feminine personality, being the only member of a gang of villains who doesn't want to fight you, but the other villains convince her to by telling her that you said "un-ladylike" things about her. And her attacks include shooting hearts. Cringe.