Mushroom Musume can be described as a magical mushroom life simulator. The art and music are very soothing, and could be described as “lo-fi”, “1-bit”, and/or “cozy”. You go through a short story-driven character creation process, followed by making choices from random events.
It’s a perfect display size for Android phone, but it has downloads for the PC, Mac, and Linux. The gameplay is mostly text-based, but its always surrounded by art and music. Each play might take you 30-45 minutes; you’ll probably set goals and try to find all the achievements and endings. There are dice rolls you can fail half the time, but it’s not a “reload the game” type of situation. Though Save/Reload is an option! It’s very replayable, so I usually just go hard-core roguelike with no saving.
Very rarely, you’ll encounter a different story-teller, one of whom has a tale that plays like a text-based adventure game + dungeon crawler. There are certainly some hidden surprises in this simulator of a year in the life of a mushroom. Some things are not documented at all… if a choice has a spiral on it, click the spiral to spend some resources on it! Part of the “fun” is figuring out what the recurring symbols on some of the choices mean.
Itch.io uses its standard “pay what you like” model.
I like/dislike the pay what you like model. I haven’t played the game yet. What would be a fair price?
$4 , though that might be underselling it if you decide to try for 100% completion. In my own situation, 50 cents per hour of gameplay is a fair price.