Mucorales is a short RPG Maker Explorer Horror game based on Little Red Riding Hood by LuN, the creator of Shita Ni.
Blanchette is on one of her routine trips to visit her ailing grandmother who lives in the woods, bringing a basket of food with her, and will be staying over for a few days. Grandma is all too happy to receive her and make mushroom stew for the two of them. But there's a problem — grandma's out of mushrooms, and so needs Blanchette to find some more in the forest. The same forest where a wolf resides, tearing apart anything it sees. Blanchette will have some decisions to make that could lead her towards discovering the secrets of the woods, either tempting her to her doom or giving her a chance to escape...
It can be purchased on Steam here
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Warning: since the game is short, all spoilers are unmarked!
Examples:
- Adaptational Villainy: The grandmother in this version is actually an... entity of mushrooms that is manipulating Blanchette into turning herself into a replacement body for her.
- Big Bad: Seemingly The Big Bad Wolf, who is haunting the forest and out to kill Blanchette while she is finding mushrooms. In truth, the wolf is an illusion made by Blanchette's grandmother, a monstrous mushroom entity that is trapping Blanchette in the forest and wants to steal her body for herself.
- Botanical Abomination: Blanchette's grandmother is a mushroom entity, likely a sapient version of the titular fungi, that exerts control over the forest, can rapidly infect animals and contort them, induces hallucinations in those it influences, and can possess the bodies of humans.
- Don't Go in the Woods: Though the Grandmother actually tells Blanchette to go into the woods and find mushrooms, there is a danger in the form of the wolf who stalks the woods. Or not; the danger is actually within the cabin itself.
- Festering Fungus: In the route where Blanchette refuses to eat her grandmother's mushroom stew, the mushrooms slowly take over the house and surrounding forest, growing bigger and more massive. In both bad ends, the Grandmother, who is actually the source of the mushrooms, makes them grow on Blanchette herself, preparing to take her body as the entity's new one.
- Gruesome Grandparent: Blanchette's sweet old grandmother is actually a thing made of mushrooms that seems to have taken some old lady and turned her body into a vessel for herself, and has been raising Blanchette with the intention of making her granddaughter into her new body.
- Meaningful Name: Mucorales is an order of fungi that is known for the damage it does to foods like bread, like the mushrooms do to the basket food if Blanchette doesn't eat it, and mucormycosis, a fungal infection with potentially dangerous consequences, like how Blanchette is slowly corrupted by the mushroom stew if she eats it.
- Multiple Endings:
- Ending 1 of 3: If Blanchette eats her Grandmother's stew every day, she eventually gets corrupted by the mushrooms and willingly becomes the new vessel for her "grandmother".
- Ending 2 of 3: If Blanchette eats the basket food instead of the mushroom stew, then doesn't go with the Hunter on the final day, she is trapped in the house by her "grandmother", who forcibly turns her into a new vessel.
- Ending 3 of 3: If Blanchette goes with the Hunter, she escapes the forest with his help.
- Slasher Smile: In the route where Blanchette eats her grandmother's stew, the grandmother's smile starts off normal but gets wider and wider the further than Blanchette is corrupted by her mushrooms, until by the final day it's spread to her cheeks and distorting her face.
