From a Practice Run to a First-Try Clear: Kaela Kovalskia Beats Shroom and Gloom’s Second Map

HOLOLIVE — Kaela Kovalskia cleared the second map of the deck-building roguelike Shroom and Gloom on her first attempt, ending a stream of more than four hours. She had gone in treating the run as practice. “That was a fun practice run,” she said afterward. “Now I know.”

The stream was her third on the game in about two weeks. She had already cleared the first map, the Shroom map, and said she had heard the second, the Gloom map, was far harder. She expected one run to take around two and a half hours and said she would try a second run if this one ended early. She played the janitor, a character she had not used before, and spent the opening stretch learning how its gunk cards work: they raise a card’s cost but keep it in hand until the gunk wears off, and cleaning cards remove it.

“First try blind run. Let’s go.” — Kaela Kovalskia, after clearing the Gloom map

The run stretched through the night. Along the way she talked about the studio’s air conditioning, which had been serviced the previous Sunday and left the room, she said, freezing even at 26.5 degrees Celsius. She put on a jacket, said she bought a unit too strong for such a small room, and said she plans to move into a new studio in 2027, which is being renovated now. She also told viewers that her Shroom and Gloom runs are a poor fit for playing off stream, because each run is new and progress does not carry over the way it does in other games.

Early on she thanked viewers for a run of membership gifts, and she spent a stretch of the stream chatting with them about her community’s group play-alongs. She also welcomed a raid of Mori Calliope’s Deadbeats about an hour and a half in. The stream drew 93 Super Chats.

She ended by saying she will play a new roguelike on Saturday, for which she has just received permission to stream it, and that she is looking forward to the activist character’s animal-themed runs in Shroom and Gloom. She said she had a collaboration planned for the following day and signed off without a raid target after looking through who was live.