Earthtongue lets you grow shrooms on April 27

Have you ever licked dirt? It ain’t all that bad.

Games are often too hectic with all that blood, gore and babies crawling out of a dead woman’s nipples (thanks, Dante’s Inferno). Sometimes I consider taking up another hobby like gardening, or magic mushrooms. Unfortunately both of those involve going outside and so Earthtongue is here to save the day.

Earthtongue’s a game by indie developer Eric Hornby where you lovingly tend to a garden of bugs and mushrooms on an alien planet. Or you can leave it all to handle itself. Or you can tear shit up and unleash a horde of locusts to obliterate the freaking ecosystem forever. Or you can gently breed cute bugs. It’s a pretty strange game, and not something I’d have expected to get through the Greenlight system, but lo and behold it has.

yep! Earthtongue will be available on steam April 27th!

— EricHermit (@Erichermit) April 21, 2015

Hornby has announced the game will be coming to Steam on April 27, but has been available on Itch.io for quite a while for the cost of $5 or, interestingly, by paying with a piece of fan art. Someone send him an interpretive dance about two beetles banging and see what happens.

There’s mushroom for growth in the genre and this game seems like a fun-gi, so we’ll see if it spore-ns any copycats after its release. There’s the necessary fungal puns that qualify me as a writer, now get the hell out of my space garden.