Fungal horror is one of the fastest-growing modes in modern games and television. The Last of Us televised it into mainstream awareness in 2023. The indie space has been working the material for longer, often with more specificity than the big releases. This piece from the team at Tyrian Games covers what fungal horror is, why it works, and how HAWKER's akhlosis reagent fits into the wider tradition.
TL;DR
- Fungal horror draws on real biology, particularly Ophiocordyceps fungi that parasitise insects.
- The Last of Us televised the concept in 2013 as a game and 2023 as an HBO series, making it mainstream.
- The indie space has explored fungal horror extensively, from Darkwood's mushroom forests to Dredge's atmospheric fog-horror.
- HAWKER uses akhlosis, an alien fungal reagent, as the central biological-catastrophe mechanic. The game's Laustic aliens brought it to Earth in their starship.
- The tradition has specific scientific grounding and rich design possibilities that most games don't exploit.
What's actually in the science
Fungal horror works because real fungi do things that look horrifying to a mammalian intuition. The scientific reality is worth knowing before we turn to the games.
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the "zombie-ant fungus," is the poster specimen of fungal body-horror. It infects tropical ants, takes over their nervous systems, makes them climb to specific locations above the forest floor, and then erupts from their heads to release spores. The behavioural hijacking is real. The infected ants are called "zombie ants" in the scientific literature, which is not a metaphor.
Armillaria ostoyae in eastern Oregon is the largest documented living organism on earth, a single honey fungus individual covering roughly 3.4 square miles and estimated to be 2,400 to 8,650 years old. The visible mushrooms are fruiting bodies. The actual organism is an underground mycelial network connecting every tree in a significant portion of forest. Every plant root in that area touches the same individual.
Mycelial networks in healthy forests connect plants across species through what forest ecologists have called the "wood wide web." Trees share nutrients and chemical signals across species boundaries through fungal intermediaries. This isn't new age hand-waving; it's published ecology, and it's shifted how scientists think about forest cooperation.
These three facts are why fungal horror works. Real fungi do things that look like science fiction. Games that ground their fungal mechanics in real biology get a free atmospheric lift because the material is already weird.
The Last of Us as genre vector
The Last of Us, developed by Naughty Dog and released by Sony in 2013, used Ophiocordyceps unilateralis as the zombie-vector premise. The game's fungal-infected humans, its clickers and stalkers and bloaters, were all modelled on the real fungal behaviour. Most of the game's writing-room discussions about the infected referenced papers on ant-cordyceps specifically.
The Last of Us mainstreamed the concept in games. The 2023 HBO series mainstreamed it again for broader audiences. Part of what made both land was the combination of plausible-sounding science (the cold open in the HBO pilot, with the fictional mycologist explaining the threat, is near-verbatim real ecology) and visceral body-horror.
Post-Last of Us, fungal horror became a recognisable design category. The 2020 Last of Us Part II extended the template. The 2023 HBO series created a second wave of cultural permission for the trope. Indie games accelerated their fungal-horror work through the mid-2020s, often with more specificity than the bigger releases.
Indie games working the fungal vein
Eight indie games worth knowing for their fungal horror or mycelium design.
Darkwood (Acid Wizard Studio, 2017) uses mushrooms and fungal mutation extensively. The Polish forest setting is infested with fungal creatures, and the game's herbalism and alchemy systems lean hard on mycological ingredients. Darkwood's night-escalation pattern with fungal enemies is one of the cleanest indie examples of the category.
Inscryption (Daniel Mullins Games, 2021) uses fungal imagery in its second act and in specific cards. The game's not centrally about fungi but the mushroom motif is a recurring element, particularly in the more disturbing card depictions.
Rain World (Videocult, 2017) has a multi-species ecosystem where fungal elements appear among the food web. Less centrally fungal than other entries but worth noting for ecological credibility.
Mineko's Night Market (Meowza Games, 2023) uses fungal imagery more whimsically than most. Different register from Darkwood, same biological reference pool.
Neva (Nomada Studio, 2024) from the Gris team includes fungal elements in its post-apocalyptic world design.
Stray (BlueTwelve Studio, 2022) uses zurk (fungal-adjacent biological enemies) as a major threat. The zurk specifically aren't strictly fungi but the design language leans on fungal-parasitic imagery.
Bramble: The Mountain King (Dimfrost Studio, 2023) uses fungal horror in Scandinavian folklore register, which is a tonal variant most of the category doesn't explore.
HAWKER (Tyrian Games, September 2026) uses akhlosis, a fictional alien fungus, as the central reagent behind the game's catastrophe. Our game sits at the intersection of fungal horror and Breton folklore, which is a specific combination we haven't seen elsewhere.
Fungal horror beyond games
Worth flagging that fungal horror has deep roots in speculative fiction beyond games. William Hope Hodgson's The Voice in the Night (1907) is an early fungal-body-horror classic. Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation (2014) weaponises fungal imagery in a more literary register. The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey (2014) uses Ophiocordyceps more directly. Mira Grant's Parasite trilogy runs the same biological-horror territory with different organisms.
The common thread across fungal horror fiction is that the fungus isn't a monster in the conventional sense. It's a mode of life that inherits the body, rewrites its behaviour, and propagates itself. The horror is distributed rather than concentrated. You can't fight a mycelial network the way you fight a dragon. That distributed quality is what makes the category feel specifically modern, and specifically philosophically unsettling, even when the science is honest.
How Hawker's akhlosis works
The game's central fictional biology is worth unpacking because it's the specific design spine that makes HAWKER different from other fungal-horror entries.
Akhlosis is a fictional fungus native to Austica, the homeworld of the Laustic alien race. On Austica, akhlosis is the basis of the entire ecosystem. It produces fruiting bodies that release spores year-round. Its mycelial network underground connects all life on the planet, and the Laustic themselves have internal akhlotic mycelium attached to their nervous systems, giving them a limited form of telepathic communication through the network.
The Laustic ship Caladrius crashed into Ysward roughly 125 years before HAWKER's timeline starts, spilling most of its akhlosis cargo across the duchy. On Earth, akhlosis doesn't behave the way it does on Austica. It infects local flora and fauna incompatibly, causing the "blight" that ruined Ysward. It produces "the Fallen," an undead state specific to Earth that doesn't happen on Austica. And it produces ichor as a waste product, the amber fuel-and-currency that powers the game's economy.
The design beats from this framework are specific. Akhlosis isn't a disease in the conventional sense. It's a native ecosystem trying to colonise a world that isn't built for it. The humans aren't fighting a zombie plague; they're collateral damage in an ecological mismatch. That framing lets HAWKER use fungal horror without trafficking in Last of Us's specific anxieties, and the Breton-folklore overlay (Ankou as the alien misidentified as a death-spirit) gives us a different kind of cultural texture.
Why fungal horror works in games specifically
Four reasons the category is particularly well-suited to games.
Distributed enemies produce good encounter variety. A mycelial network that spawns multiple body-types from the same biological source can justify a wide enemy roster without narrative strain. The Last of Us' clickers, stalkers, runners, and bloaters are all the same underlying organism at different stages. Games get enemy variety and biological coherence for free.
Environmental storytelling has ready material. Fungal growth on environments tells the player how long the catastrophe has been happening. Spore clouds, mycelial mats, fungal outgrowths on architecture: all of these are visual cues that communicate world state without dialogue.
The moral ambiguity is built in. The fungus isn't evil. It's alive. This is a cleaner philosophical puzzle than "the zombies are evil" and it produces the kind of moral weight that grimdark-adjacent indie games try to achieve.
The scientific grounding wards off fantasy-genre fatigue. Players who are tired of generic dragons or vampires respond to fungal horror because it doesn't read as fantasy-genre furniture. Even when the fiction is elaborate, the real-biology undertone keeps the material feeling specific.
A first-hand Hawker design note
One of our key akhlosis design decisions, during 2024's worldbuilding pass, was whether to let the player understand the science behind the blight from early in the game. The alternative was to keep the akhlotic origin mysterious until late-game revelation.
We went with the gradual-reveal approach. The first hour of HAWKER presents the blight as supernatural catastrophe in a Breton-folklore register. Players encounter Ankou, hear Duval's stories about the Fall, learn about the Fallen as monsters. The biological frame is invisible.
Across the thirty-day arc, the pieces assemble. Belissant drops academic-sounding hints. Aymeri's Aurelian expedition brings scientific-curiosity framing. Lore fragments from the Caladrius reveal the alien origin. By the late game, attentive players have a full picture: the blight is an alien ecosystem trying to colonise Earth, and everything the humans thought was folklore is their culture making sense of sci-fi.
This gradual-reveal structure is the thing we think makes HAWKER's fungal horror distinctive. Most fungal-horror games tell you up front what you're dealing with. HAWKER makes the player earn the understanding across the run. The moment when a player realises the Korrigans are aliens and Ankou is their scientist is supposed to reframe everything they've seen before. That reframe is load-bearing to the game's emotional arc, and it's only possible because we're working in fungal horror rather than generic fantasy. The real biology lets the reveal land as discovery rather than as arbitrary plot turn.
How to research fungal horror for your own game
Four starting points.
Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life (2020) is the best modern popular-science book on fungi. Strong on mycelial networks, fungal intelligence, and the philosophical implications of fungal biology.
The Ophiocordyceps unilateralis entry on Wikipedia, then the academic papers it cites, will give you enough real cordyceps ecology to ground a game.
The Last of Us development blog posts and post-mortem interviews are worth reading for how Naughty Dog translated the real science into game mechanics.
Peter McCoy's Radical Mycology (2016) is a less academic but practically-oriented fungi book with good visual reference material for game art teams.
FAQ
What is fungal horror?
A subgenre of horror that uses fungal biology, particularly mycelial networks and parasitic fungi like Ophiocordyceps, as the source of threat or atmosphere.
Is The Last of Us' cordyceps real?
The real Ophiocordyceps unilateralis infects ants, not humans, and can't survive human body temperature. The Last of Us' fictional variant adapts to humans. The real science is real; the human threat is fiction.
What's akhlosis in HAWKER?
A fictional alien fungus native to the Laustic homeworld of Austica. It's the central reagent behind HAWKER's catastrophe, misidentified by humans as Breton folklore.
What's the largest fungus in the world?
Armillaria ostoyae in eastern Oregon, a single honey fungus organism covering roughly 3.4 square miles. It's also one of the oldest living organisms at 2,400 to 8,650 years.
Is HAWKER like The Last of Us?
Structurally no. Both use fungal horror but HAWKER's is alien-origin, framed through Breton folklore, and operates as ecosystem rather than disease. The Last of Us is closer to pandemic zombie horror.
What fungal horror games should I play?
The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II for the canonical. Darkwood for indie folk-fungal horror. Stray for fungal-adjacent enemies in sci-fi. HAWKER in September 2026 for alien-fungal Breton-folklore hybrid.
Spoiler wall
Everything above keeps to the demo-line framing for Hawker. The blight, the Fallen, and the hints of deeper causes are all shown in the first seven days. The specific akhlosis mechanics, the full Laustic origin, and the reveal arcs across days 20 to 30 sit behind this wall.
Closing
Fungal horror is one of modern gaming's richest categories, grounded in real biology and supported by a deep literary and cinematic tradition. HAWKER's akhlosis sits at an unusual intersection of fungal horror and Breton folklore, a combination we haven't seen elsewhere. If you're making a game that draws on fungal imagery, the material is deep.
Next read: Grimdark indie games in 2026, or Folk horror in indie games.
Further reading
For related context see Breton folklore in modern games.