Boogie Fungi Demo Review – A Cozy & Silly Colony Management Game

Developer: Wobbly Lines
Release Date: To be announced
Price: To be announced
Platforms: Steam

Boogie Fungi Gameplay Experience

Screenshot of a large cartoon mushroom colony having a dance party form the video game Boogie Fungi.

In Boogie Fungi, players will build and nurture a colony of party-loving mushrooms while protecting them from hungry foragers. The Boogie Fungi demo gives players a chance to experience managing their first colony and expanding to a larger area.

The game begins by introducing players to several helpful merchants, who offer things such as substrates to grow and house new mushrooms and defense services. After quick introductions, Boogie Fungi players can begin buying and placing substrates and accepting move-in requests from a variety of fungi.

Each mushroom has specific substrate requirements that must be met before it can move in. As mushrooms grow in the colony, they will begin to release spores, which players will collect and use as currency to purchase more substrates, defenses, and eventually nutrience generators.

While expanding the colony is the primary objective, Boogie Fungi players will need to make sure they keep their colony happy. Boredom is a surefire way to lose mushrooms in the colony, so players will have to keep expanding to unlock more parties to keep the colony happy.

During parties, players can also accept dance challenges from the various mushrooms around the colony. These challenges are in the form of a small rhythm mini-game, where players will have to use WASD to land each beat.

A fun thing about parties in Boogie Fungi is that they act as a pause button for the game. While parties are active, foragers will not ransack the colony, and new move-in requests are paused. However, players can still add new substrates and defenses, as well as collect nutrients and upgrade their colony.

This makes handling management tasks around the colony easier. When you do not have to worry about foragers getting in the way and the colony getting bored and leaving, parties also offer players a chance to step away without worrying about things turning into a disaster if they need to take a screen break.

One issue I ran into in the demo was that enemies would occasionally get stuck on objects and would be unable to leave the map. This would cause them to rapidly turn back and forth on the screen, creating a slight strobbing effect. This was easy to ignore with the small foragers; however, once the larger foragers began getting stuck, the strobbing was hard to ignore and would cause small headaches.

While Boogie Fungi is still in the demo stages, so this issue will more than likely be fixed before the game’s full release, the potential strobbing effects are just something players should be aware of.

Final Thoughts on Boogie Fungi

Despite one issue with stuck enemies, the demo runs relatively smoothly and was a fun gameplay experience. The art style is quirky, and each mushroom character does a good job of representing real-world fungi as far as their appearance goes. The music is also fun and makes it very easy to sit for an hour or more and just casually play.

The Boogie Fungi demo can be completed in an hour to an hour and a half, depending on how long players let each dance party run. The Boogie Fungi demo will be publicly available in mid-September on Steam.