The Facility in Shroom and Gloom: The Second Path

What it is

Early Access ships with “two separate paths to reach the Gloom, each with entirely unique card pools”. The Facility is the second one, and Team Lazerbeam devoted a dev diary to it, narrated by artist and designer Ben Beam.

Everything below comes from that dev diary. The team was explicit that they were not showing the new cards, enemies or rewards in it — only the world.

Stage one: a metal tunnel

The path opens in “an ominous metal tunnel” with flickering lights, leading to a body in the remains of a hazmat suit. You loot their supplies before heading on. That is the tonal announcement: the first path’s rocky caverns are gone.

Stage two: caves, but industrial

You return to mushroom caves, except now “the influence of a much more advanced culture is everywhere” — rusted chain-link fencing, broken machinery, barrels of toxic waste. The doors change too: the wooden doors of the first path become “high-tech doors with digital locks that need to be gunked or hacked”.

Stage three: the facility itself

Through a destroyed reception area into “a maze of decontamination chambers, servers, and laboratories”. The dev diary declines to explain what was being researched, but points at the clues: studies of the grey caps, relics recovered from The Gloom, experiments splicing fungal organics with mammals, and bio-organic gunk over everything.

Stage four: the zone

Past the compound, you enter what the team internally call the zone — caverns where “the otherworldly influence of the Gloom bleeds into our world, warping and corrupting it”, and where the laws of physics start melting. This is the final act of the path.

The story reveal underneath it

The Facility makes something explicit that was previously a hint. The dev diary points to FLASH, one of the starting explore cards, which “applies vulnerable to subterranean grey caps” and shows a modern smartphone in its art — placed there back when the game was a jam project. The first path could pass for fantasy; the second one makes it plain that this is “a game about picking through the aftermath of scenes where humans have been drawn towards the mystery of the Gloom and met grizzly ends”.

What this means for your decks

Two paths with entirely unique card pools means a line that carried you through the caves may have no equivalent here, and the lock-picking tools change shape. Until the build is live nobody outside the studio has the Facility card pool — when it lands, it goes on the cards page alongside the existing entries.

Related

• Characters — the five classes that can walk either path.
• Exploration guide — camping, hazards and locks on the original path.
• Roadmap — what else Early Access includes.