If you’re struggling with the fact that it’s still only Tuesday and the weekend is but a dot on the horizon, Kinoko Girly (‘Mushroom Girly’), a free mobile game currently generating a lot of buzz here in Japan, might be just the thing to keep you going at least until Hump Day is over.
Featuring illustrations by popular fashion designer Hajime Yoshio, Kinoko Girly is one of the simplest smartphone games you’ll ever play. Asking you, the person in charge of feeding a bevy of frighteningly shaped mushrooms to a woman with a penchant for fungi, to choose which of the two ‘shrooms offered up at any one time is delicious and which is poisonous, it’s simply a case of guesswork for the sake of it, but it’s surprisingly addictive. And altogether weird.
Available on both Android and iOS, on paper the game sounds about as mundane as tapping your phone’s screen to make a pixely bird flap its wings did, but having tried Kinoko Girly for ourselves today, we found it strangely moreish.
The game features both Japanese and (shaky, but we appreciate the effort) English text, and basically consists of an animated image of a giant-eyed woman sizing up two sparkling mushrooms that float on either side of her head. The player simply taps one of the two mushrooms, trying to choose the right one – i.e. the one that won’t result in death – for Kinoko Girly to munch on.
Choose correctly and you are rewarded with a smiley “OK!” or “Yum!” message and an image of Kinoko Girly bashfully enjoying her mushroom.
You’re then given a new combination of mushrooms to choose between, with the goal being to see how long you can last on pure dumb luck (the whole thing is down to chance, so attempting to remember which mushrooms killed you last time won’t help) before choosing a poison mushroom and killing the girl, who – rather than suffering with agonising stomach cramps for hours before the spindly fingers of Death find her, as would happen in reality – swoons daintily and disappears behind the results screen.
If you’re feeling competitive, there are simple leaderboards and even additional outfits (of course there are outfits!) to be unlocked by chaining together correct guesses.
▼ Filter leaderboards by ‘day’, ‘week’, or ‘all’
▼ If Lady Luck is with you, you can unlock multiple outfits
That’s really all there is to it, but we dare you not to give in to that “just one more try” feeling at least once while playing. Oh, and if you manage to score above 15, be sure to let us know in the comments section below. No cheating, now!
Source: Gamebiz (Japanese) Google Play / iTunes
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