What the game is
Mycelium: The Silent Contract is a first-person extraction horror game set in a dark, liminal forest. You play as an unwilling contractor for a company called Mycelium: you signed a contract in exchange for a successful life, and now that life has ended, you owe the company work. Your handler demands results — harvest the mycelium specimens and extract. The fine print of the contract stays cryptic, and the forest keeps its own secrets, so the question of what you actually signed hangs over every mission.
Each mission drops you into a procedurally generated forest with dynamic weather and spatial sound. It is never the same twice, so you have to find your bearings again each time. Dozens of unique locations hold their own mysteries, puzzles and dangers, and more than ten twisted monsters and other threats stand between you and your objective. Silence is your friend here: stealth matters, and getting lost can mean never coming back.
Playing it with friends
The game supports single player and online co-op. In co-op you coordinate through advanced voice chat and other means, which fits a game where sound gives away so much — spatial audio means a noise in the trees tells you something is out there, and tells others where you are too.
The loop is shared: gather mycelium, find valuables, and get to extraction before your time runs out. Everyone is working toward the same contract, so splitting up to cover more ground is a real option, but the forest punishes isolation. The longer the group stays, the more dangerous it becomes, since something out there wants your mycelium more than you do. Extraction is the point where the run pays off — you spend the mycelium you carried out to buy better equipment and more time for future missions.
Before you start
This is Early Access, so expect it to change and expand over time. It is a PvE game: the threats are the forest, its monsters and its puzzles, not other players.
The core tension is time versus greed. More time in the forest means more mysteries to face and solve, but also more danger. Upgraded equipment helps — the company sells better gear as you succeed — but the game explicitly does not get easier as you progress. Treat each run as a decision about how much you can carry out before the forest takes it back.