Beyond the Grove Review for Steam Early Access

Beyond the Grove Review for Steam

Developed by Not a Duck / Published by Not a Duck

TL:DR: Imagine Horizon: Zero Dawn with mushrooms. And as an RTS roguelike. 9/10.

Beyond the Grove is a tots adorbs RTS autobattler roguelike…Translation, players will command an army of adorable mushroom warriors, called “caps,” and powerful elemental golems to push back a spreading corruption that threatens their peaceful woodland grove.

Story

You are a Grove Keeper, minding your mushroom brethren, when suddenly meteors rain down from the sky, bringing corruption that threatens your mushy civilization. As the Grove Keeper, you must venture… wait for it…Beyond the Grove….to cleanse the corruption at its source.

Between battles, you are summoned back to the Mother Mushroom, who guides you on your journey and also doubles as a shop where you can spend essence and gain power-ups. The story unfolds through brief dialogue, but there are hints at deeper mysteries, including the appearance of summoners and the overarching question of what’s causing the corruption.

Gameplay

Beyond the Grove’s gameplay is as straightforward as its story. Each round is an auto-battle where strategic positioning and resource management determine victory or defeat. Each run begins with the Player/Grove Keeper spawning mushroom warriors, called caps. There are a finite number of caps per battle, displayed as a bar on the left side of the screen. These are your main forces, and you typically have about 100, though this can be increased by spending essence, spending skill points, or gathering magic mushrooms during battle. Upgrading the number of troops is essential because once the bar depletes, you face getting overrun by the enemy’s numbers.

BTG is an autobattler, so you cannot control individual units, but you can sort of guide them around the battlefield with rally points. These are little blue flags that you can place around the map to have your caps mass around. Rally points are essential for coordinating attacks because, as the tip box says, a mass of caps is a lot more effective than a small trickle.

Combat gets interrupted about every 60 seconds when the Focus Bar fills. Located at the top of the screen, when this bar fills up, the battle pauses, allowing players to reassign their rally points, create golems, and just get a breather to assess the battlefield. This pause-and-play rhythm gives you moments to strategize without the overwhelming pressure of real-time management. While part of the charm of RTS is the quick succession of panic-induced heart attacks, the pause-and-play mechanic makes BTG a much more cozy RTS experience (rather than a non-stop screaming one).

As your caps face off against enemies, you will gain glyph stone fragments. Each glyph stone can create a golem, which is a special elemental unit. Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Light, Darkness, and Nature are the seven base golems, but each one can be leveled up and combined to create high-health, high-hitting combat units that can turn the tide of a battle. Each elemental has a pairing they are effective against and one that they are weak against. For example, Earth Golems are strong against Water Elements, but weak against Air Elements. This adds another layer of strategy and encourages the player to unlock elements at the Mother Mush ASAP.

The battle map also generates resources that can turn the tide of battle. Huts appear on the map, and whichever side captures it will unlock bows and arrows. Sometimes a wild golem will spawn, and if you can defeat it while also battling the corruption, then you can gain extra glyphstones. Magic mushrooms, treasure chests, and essence stones can all add additional caps, essence, and glyphstones.

Defeat is inevitable in a roguelike. Sigh. In between runs, players will return to the main screen where they can further level up their Grove Keeper with Skill Points. Unlike blessings purchased from Mother Mushroom, which disappear after each defeat, Skill Points will affect every battle going forward. Some level-ups include increasing the total number of caps that will spawn, starting with multiple elements unlocked at the start of a new run, levelling up golems, gaining additional weapons for your caps, etc. I have to really shout out my appreciation that skill points can be redistributed as often as players want without penalty. This allowed me to try out lots of different strategies, without fearing I was making a huge mistake.

Music

Without a doubt, Beyond the Grove’s standout feature is its music. It is a dynamic soundtrack that changes depending on what sort of units the player puts on the field. Each golem type adds a new instrument to the musical composition. As players unlock elements, they also unlock cellos, violins, and pianos. The more types you have in play, the more the soundtrack builds into a rich, layered, battle symphony.

Overall

9/10

Beyond the Grove successfully straddles cozy and stressful.

The developers did a great job of creating strategic depth and maintaining fun. I don’t play a lot of RTS, and whenever I step into a genre I don’t play regularly, I usually get overloaded with tutorial screens (I’m looking at you Endless: Legends 2, love you, but so much reading!) Beyond the Grove gradually introduced its strategic concepts, allowing the early battles to serve as tutorials, before ramping up to genuinely challenging encounters that required careful planning and adaptation.

I know I am hooked when I find myself mentally replaying battles and planning my next run during work meetings. Even my boss noticed the little mushrooms I was doodling in my notebook.

If the gameplay wasn’t enough, the art style and music make the whole experience something really special, in my opinion. I’ve never played a game with a generative soundtrack before, and knowing I was adding new instruments actually affected gameplay decisions.

With all this said, you might be wondering, huh, well, why only 9 out of 10 instead of a perfect score? I hmm’d and haad and whmm’d and wha’d and decided that there are a few things I think could be adjusted. Not changed, just adjusted. One, I think having more control of the golems would be really nice. Like being able to assign which rally point they go to. I had a couple of situations where I seemed to have all my golems bunching up at one flag when I really needed them at another. I had another interaction where I had Light and Dark Golems in play, and I wanted to send the Light Golems to attack the enemy’s Dark Golems, while sending my own Dark Golems to reinforce an attack on an enemy base, but I just had no control over who went where. I would also like a little more visual differentiation for special caps. There are a couple of blessings that can be purchased from Mother, such as an 8% chance to spawn a stronger/faster cap. Great! But I have no idea when it happens, because they all look the same.

Finally, for all of the amazing detail in the music, I thought that just a tad more attention could have been paid to the actual battlefields. I can imagine the battlefield doing a little more environmental storytelling to help flesh out the loosely sketched narrative. Corruption could become more evident on the trees, flowers, or water as players begin losing a battle, and vice versa, things could heal as players win.

These are just random musings, and I hope they show more about how much time I spent thinking about this game rather than any actual critique.

You can try out the demo of Beyond the Grove on Steam now.

Beyond the Grove is available for PC via Steam Early Access and you can try out the demo for free right now.

Related: Reviews by Michelle Jones

Michelle Jones

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I'm a completionist gamer who just needs to find that one last object and clear that final dungeon. I love all video games, from open world sandboxes on a console to a mindless match three on my phone. In addition to gaming and writing, I am a graduate student working on a thesis about the ancient Icelandic Sagas. Feel free to ask me anything about Vikings.