Under the Elm

Your grandmother left her cabin to you.

She left a basket by the door, a field guide to document what you find, and eleven villagers who still expect her remedies on a regular basis. She left a hearth grown cold, her cat - Gabriel - still curled in front of it, a library behind the wall, and an attic full of thoughts she never got to share. Most importantly, she left you the woods. Since the day she died, something has been finding its way out of them, and the village is losing her to it.

Forage the forest she walked.

Seven biomes each with its own season-by-season cast of 64 mushroom and 63 botanical species drawn from real foraging traditions: Spring morels and wild garlic, summer chicken of the woods and lavender, autumn porcini and hawthorn, and winter velvet shanks and snowdrops. Twenty-three of them are hiding in plain sight as dangerous lookalikes, mimicking the safe varieties. Identify what you can with the Field Guide, and have Fern help you with the ones you can't. As you explore the world she left behind, you'll catalog everything in Grandma's Field Guide, the pages filling in - one species at a time.

Brew the recipes she perfected.

126 remedies built from six forms of the same plant: fresh, dried, hot water decoction, cold infusion, alcohol distillation, and fermentation. Each method draws out different properties of the same mushroom, and every recipe was hers first, written in margin notes and half-remembered conversations. You'll find them all in time.

Restore what she loved.

The hearth, the cellar, the library, the attic, the greenhouse: all hers, and all closed up the day she stopped being able to manage them alone. Open each one and it gives something back - visitors at the hearth, aging barrels in the cellar, recipes along her shelves, mushrooms growing under glass, her journal in the attic - and with it, another piece of who she was.

Tend who she took care of.

Eleven villagers, each with their own stories, their own requests, and their own memories of your grandmother - memories that are starting to slip. Bram at the inn still sets out her cup some mornings, then stands there wondering who it's for. Aldric needs help with his fields, and loses her name halfway through saying it. Elara studies the stars and asks for things grandma would have known to bring. Bring what they need, and listen when they're ready to tell you why. Help them, and they keep hold of her.

... including Gabriel.

Forty years at her hearth, and he knows this cabin better than you ever will. He's waiting by the fire on your first morning, in no hurry to explain himself, and he'll warm to you at his own pace, the way cats do. But he's the only one who hasn't started to forget her, and while the village loses her a little more each day, he keeps his watch at the window, eyes on the tree line. One day you may realize he is more than what he seems.

Learn what she kept at bay.

Something has been coming out of the woods at night: small steps crossing the floor before dawn, a basket of mushrooms that isn't quite what you picked, a pale knot left where nothing should be. She knew the old protections - rowan, salt, and iron, each in its proper place - and the village still keeps the habits she taught them, though no one can say anymore who taught them or why. Learn those ways again, and somewhere out past the last tree, find where it's all been coming from.

Hear what she heard.

The Wood Wide Web is real. Seven Mother Trees scattered across the woods remember her, and remember things she never wrote down. Whatever the village loses doesn't disappear - it waits in the roots, deeper than anything that's taking it can reach, and the trees can give it back. Bring them tribute and they'll speak. Bring them enough and they'll grant you a Golden Mushroom: six in all, scattered across the biomes she walked. Find all six and who knows where you'll end up.

What this game is.

Somewhere to go on an evening when you need one, and a grandmother you never meet, only learn slowly; the way you'd learn anyone you'd just missed: from the recipes she perfected, the field guide she left for your hands, and a village that remembers her a little differently in every house, for as long as it still can.

All until the last page is full, and she isn't a stranger anymore - to you, or to them.

Under the Elm is a solo project from Crooked Stone Studios made with care, slowness, and a deep love for the woods.

While this game draws on real mycology, and its Field Guide is written to be accurate, it is a game, and not a foraging guide - please don't use it to identify or prepare wild mushrooms!