While B-movie horror tradition dictates that alien meteorites are the leading cause of reanimated corpses in small-town America, Mushroom Men posits that equally alarming things occur below the human scale. It’s as if Ed Wood had somehow negotiated a limitless budget to adapt The Borrowers: extraterrestrial gloop brings mushrooms, plants and all manner of creepy crawlies to greater levels of sentience. Naturally, the result is bitter warfare, waged at ankle height, between different species of fungus.

As Pax, a mushroom of the bolete family, you must find your way through such cavernous and hazardous environments as sheds, gardens and chimneys on a quest to safeguard your tribe from the attacks of the evil Amanitas and Lepiota. From what we’ve played so far, these settings aren’t just scene dressing for a well-prescribed obstacle course but large platforming playgrounds that you’re encouraged to exhaustively explore.

Objectives are dotted throughout. One level sees you search the environment for heavy and precariously balanced objects with which to kill the gloop-infected rabbits below; another requires you to prove your prowess in combat through a succession of battles against the ninja-like shiitake mushrooms; another still sees you puzzle out activating the Morel kingdom’s arcane defence mechanisms in order to break a siege by a rival tribe.

The actual completion of these tasks is of minimal interest and the game lacks Mario’s precise control. Nonetheless, plotting a route to your goal holds the kind of pleasure it did in Crackdown, and exploration is well rewarded through upgrades and secrets. However, with a combat system that amounts to Remote waggling, and most other abilities limited to context, the game will have to hope its world is sufficiently crammed with delights and its platforming challenge persistently engaging to coax players away from Galaxy-sized diversions and down to the garden shed.