I suspect not many videogames have officially licensed fungus, but it certainly makes sense for Avowed, an RPG where you spend 50 hours in the shoes of a hero who has mushrooms growing out of their face. Thanks to a company called North Spore, you can now own your own little piece of the Dreamscourge, with grow-your-own mushroom kits where fungus literally bursts out of the chest cavity of an infested skeleton. And then you can eat it!
It's $30 per kit, and there can be blue, pink, or golden oyster fungus inside—all ready to grow edible mushrooms. They're pretty substantial boxes, and with proper care you should get two harvests out of a box, and you can even repot them to keep them going after that. North Spore was kind enough to send me a kit to check out for myself, and though my mushrooms haven't erupted yet, so far the preparation and care has been agreeably simple—you basically just open the front of the box, cut an X into the plastic to expose the fungus to air, and then remember to spritz them with water using the included sprayer bottle a few times a day. In theory, mushrooms shall follow soon after.
The Avowed branding is, admittedly, only skin-deep—it's basically an extra cardboard sheathe over one of North Spore's normal spray-and-grow kits, though the art does add a layer of mystique to the whole project. For an extra layer of authenticity, you can download an STL for free that allows you to 3D print one of Avowed's bears (I can't escape them) and plant the kit inside it—before long, it'll have mushrooms growing out of its face, for that true Dreamscourge feel. Delightful!
"We want more people to be growing mushrooms at home," says Matt McInnis, co-founder of North Spore. "They're incredibly easy to grow, and you can grow them on a countertop, or if you're a gardener, they're great for adding to a garden. We try to produce a ton of educational content to demystify mushrooms."
I ask if he has any tips for keeping my own kit alive, and then slightly regret the question. "It's pretty straightforward. If you don't do anything, eventually the mushrooms will find their way out… They'll just burst out of the box." Nothing like a gardening project ready to fight its way out of the packaging to keep you on your toes.
Odd though the collaboration is, part of me wonders why I've not seen something like this before. Fungus has always featured across a huge swathe of videogames—as McInnis points out, it's been an inextricable part of the medium since Mario first ate a mushroom to power up. In recent years they've been even more in vogue thanks to the ongoing success of The Last of Us across games and TV, and particularly in fantasy and sci-fi they're a key touchstone for conveying a sense of wonder and strangeness in fictional lands.
"I think mushrooms are fundamentally pretty mysterious organisms to humans," says McInnis. "Our understanding of them has grown by leaps and bounds in the past hundred years, but compared to our knowledge of plants or even the animal kingdom it's very limited… I think that translated into this cultural phenomenon that we're all noticing over the past few years where mushrooms show up in everything. They're powerful tools for medicine, but they can be incredibly poisonous, and they can alter consciousness even… they're mysterious enough that they fit into the fantasy genre quite well."
So should we expect more videogame mushroom kits to come?
"If you know anyone from the Last of Us team, send this over to them!" says McInnis. "I honestly think it'd be super fun to do more of this stuff. Mushrooms are such interesting things to look at too and they grow so quickly, I can see Twitch streamers playing these games and having some mushrooms growing [behind them on stream]. I would love to do some more collaborations like that."
In the meantime, I can certainly speak to the extra immersion of the soft, peaty odor of growing mushrooms wafting past my nose as I make my way through the Living Lands, and if I can get a good meal out of them before my adventures come to an end that'll be a bonus. McInnis also assures me the Dreamscourge is not real and that there is no chance of the mushrooms infecting my brain or face—so don't worry, if you start noticing my articles devolving into nonsensical ravings, that's just business as usual and almost certainly not fungus-related.
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