Lone Fungus review

last edited 2025-02-07

Lone Fungus is a metroidvania I played in 2025-02. My playthrough took a little over 10 hours; I didn't 100%, but did do a lot of optional exploring. My final opinion is that it's just okay.

Combat

The combat mechanics are pretty good. It seems to be inspired by Hollow Knight, as it uses a melee attack that doesn't interrupt movement, can pogo on enemies or spikes and refills dash while doing so, doesn't hitstun enemies, has a mana system replenished by melee attacks that can be used either to heal or cast damaging spells, and discrete health. It also has an equipment system similar to Hollow Knight, where each item takes up a certain number of equipment points and you can equip whatever combination you want within that budget, and where items don't get power crept throughout the game.

As for the spells, there are 10 of them, but you're not expected to use all. You have a button that cycles which spell is equipped, and you can also remove unwanted spells from the cycle so you don't accidentally equip them. I usually kept just 1 or 2 enabled. I like the ways they can be manipulated to modulate their effects. For example, the bouncy green ball deals damage based on its velocity, so it can hit really good if you smack it into an enemy, but not so good if it just rolls into them. There's one that moves back and forth and can multi-hit if it stays in the boss's hitbox, and you can change its direction by whacking it. Sometimes I got it to hit 5 times with one cast. Overall, I mostly reserved my mana for heals, but there were definitely a few times I found it effective to spend mana on damaging spells.

There's also a "parry" mechanic (lets you deflect projectiles by standing in place and timing a button press), and it's the first take on a deflect-like mechanic in this type of game that I really like. Instead of strict timing, its main limitation is that you only have 3 parry charges and they recharge slowly, so parry can't make positioning or attacking irrelevant (okay, there was one boss I cheesed using only parry, but I consider it an issue with the design of that boss and its arena, not the parry mechanic itself). You can use it as a fallback for if you get into a position where you can't dodge, or as a way to deal extra damage while the boss is shooting at you from a position that's hard to reach, or as a way to defuse particularly dangerous projectiles (such as ones that bounce around).

Boss design is pretty good. Most have a decent variety of moves and many have interesting arenas, though a few of them have really unclear telegraphs. As for normal enemies... ekh, we'll get to them.

The only thing about the combat mechanics that irks me is that there are a lot of random outcomes. For example, there's an equipment that gives you a 7% chance to avoid damage, and a similar equipment that gives you a 30% chance to spawn an orb when you take damage that recovers your health if you hit it.

Platforming

Something that mildly annoys me is that the jump is *very* short, and upwards dash can only be done in the air, so you have to jump and then dash to reach almost anything.

Something I find really unique and interesting is that the sideways dash has an arc. You get a bit of upwards momentum with it, just not as much as the upwards dash, so it's kind of like a combined jump + horizontal dash.

There are a lot of precision platforming challenges, but luckily most of them are optional since that's not really my jam. Mostly they have collectibles as rewards (although collecting a lot of that collectible does lead to combat upgrades).

When I did do the platforming challenges, I often found myself struggling to remember the controls, or using the wrong ones. Why did this happen to me in Lone Fungus but not in other platformers? I think it's because there are many similar objects and abilities that require different inputs to activate. Mushmovers, which give you a little bounce and refill dash, have to be slashed. Floating crosses are activated automatically and refill dash, but *don't* give a little bounce, so the muscle memory of "attack, then wait a bit before dashing" messes me up. And wall bounce is its own input, unlike most other platformers where it's just jumping while on a wall.

I really dislike how spin jump can't interact with most of your other abilities. Once you spin, you can't dash, even if you haven't already, can't wall bounce, and can't even use normal mushmovers, and there's no way to un-spin without touching the ground. Instead, there are special mushmovers that can *only* be used while spinning. So there's 2 separate kinds of platforming challenges: ones meant to be solved with spin jump and ones meant to be solved without it. There are none that really use all your abilities.

I also don't like a pair of abilities you get early in the game, for a couple of reasons. First is the ability to deploy a mushmover on the ground so you can pogo off it, and second is the "charge jump". I don't like them because they're redundant (I never used the mushmover spell after I got charge jump), and because the time they take to deploy/charge makes them useless in combat and unpleasant outside of it. I also don't like that you can't remove the mushmover spell from your equipment cycle, so I keep having to cycle past it to equip spells I actually want. You can remove every other spell, but not this one I never used after the early game.

Exploration

I found exploration fun and addicting, as I usually do in metroidvanias, but I think it could've used more fast travel stations. I'd have dozens of areas marked on the map as "I seem to need an ability to get through here", so every time I got one, I'd revisit all of those, only to find most of them still weren't accessible, which was a bit annoying when I had to trek long distances to each one.

The game often doesn't communicate well when an ability you have can get you past an obstacle. There are *6* different kinds of obstacles I had to look up how to get past, often to find out it's a spell I already have that has no obvious relation to the type of obstacle. For example, there's doors with green buttons next to them, and the first time I saw them there was a character nearby who said "did you know you can parry your own spells?" I tried parrying all of my spells at the buttons, none of them worked, turns out it has to be the fireball spell (which I didn't have at the time). You'd think if any specific spell it would be the bouncy green ball since it seems the most corporeal. And the fireball spell is *not* gained from the area where I first saw these buttons.

One thing I appreciate that most other metroidvanias don't do is that boss arenas are always clearly telegraphed. They're rooms that are dark when you enter and only trigger the fight once you walk further in, so you never get trapped in a boss arena by surprise (except maybe the first time). I also appreciate that there isn't much of having to run back to boss arenas inbetween attempts.

Progression

This is the first RPG I've played in a long time, heck, maybe *ever*, that has *no grinding*! No money or experience. I was super excited by this. All upgrades come from exploration and bosses.

Difficulty

This game is way, *way* too easy. Normal enemies are completely non-threatening during exploration, and there are no arena rooms (rooms that lock when you enter until you kill some waves of enemies). There are a few bosses that challenged me, but even most of those I killed in 1-3 tries.

As for *why* normal enemies are non-threatening, it mostly has to do with their drops. The amount of mana you gain from attacking is far less than in Hollow Knight, but enemies have random drops too, which can include health refills, mana refills, or powerups. So you gain health way too quickly from fighting them, faster than they can be expected to damage you. They also usually die in 1 or 2 hits, and many of them do nothing other than walk toward you and deal contact damage, making them very easy to farm without getting hurt.

There are difficulty settings, and I played on normal, but the higher difficulties probably wouldn't have fixed it. They mostly change player max health. I guess if you used the custom settings to scale up their health like 5x, it might be challenging since then you'd spent more time fighting them per drop, but I haven't tried it because I didn't find out you can raise the difficulty during a playthrough until after I was done. You have to press "*lower* difficulty", and then say yes to "are you SURE you want to lower difficulty?", and then it unlocks the settings that let you raise it.

I think the best way to fix the difficulty problem would be to completely remove enemy drops. They are totally unnecessary and are the main cause.

I do think it's really cool that the difficulty settings can be adjusted independently (for example, you can scale enemy health without scaling your own).

Music

Each area has its own music, and most of them are surprisingly actionful for ambience. I liked them, but also found the intensity a bit exhausting to listen to constantly when nothing actionful is actually happening (because enemies are a joke).

No pause

Lone Fungus has a pause, but specifically disables it during boss fights. You know, the *primary time when you'd need a pause*? I have no idea why they did this. Very annoying when you want to drink water, scratch, change your seating position, or anything else during a boss.

Story

The story is pretty much nonsense. It's about the last mushroom remaining in a kingdom once built by mushrooms, and you're set on a quest to restore all the different mushroom species. Some characters suggest you should go against this and instead restore only your own kind of mushroom, and you can end the game either way, but there's not enough lore information to decide based on anything other than aesthetics.

It is funny at times, like when your character talks back irreverently to bosses telling you how they're going to crush you.