Go foraging in lovely free text adventure Mushroom Hunt

(Image credit: Tom Sykes)

Made with the promising Adventuron engine, Mushroom Hunt is a cute, small text adventure that lets you explore a mysterious woodland in some detail. You live in a hut with your grandma in said woodland, and she's tasked you with finding three mushrooms to help her with dinner. There are actually quite a few more than that scattered around, but finding even the required three will involve a good deal of exploration and text-based puzzling.

So, you first look around each scene. Then you examine individual things in more detail. Eventually, when you've poked around enough, a mushroom may present itself, or an item that you can take for later use. It's typical text adventure fare, with the usual whimsical style, and a lightly fairy tale atmosphere (but, er, without the fairies or magic), that's enhanced greatly by the wonderful pixel art at the top of the screen.

Mushroom Hunt is either a short game, or a not-so-short one, depending on how many mushrooms, and how much backstory you're inclined (or able) to uncover. I finished with the three mushrooms, not knowing there were more out there, and more snippets of familial history to discover in the wild woodland. The ending slide of this lovely adventure makes it clear what you've missed, giving you incentive and motivation to restart your mushroom hunt, to try and find everything.

For more great free experiences, check out our roundup of the best free PC games.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.