When I think cottagecore, mushrooms always come to mind. A game oozing with cuteness, pastels, and mushrooms is just a level of cozy that’s hard to explain.

At first glance, March of Shrooms feels like it should be a casual game—but the moment you start it up, it becomes very clear that there’s some real challenge hidden beneath the surface of this side-scrolling RTS, if that’s what you’re looking for.

The story goes that 99 years ago, mushrooms headed off to floating islands to create a vast civilization of fungi—but every 10 years, a storm cleanses the world and forces the fungi to start anew. You play as a tiny blue mushroom with a great idea: fight the weather before it destroys all the shrooms again.

March of Shrooms resembles several older games. It feels at-home with the likes of classic side-scrolling MMO Maple Story, for instance, though the gameplay made me immediately think of the 2009 RTS Swords and Soldiers, a personal favorite from a long-gone era.

How does a side-scrolling RTS work? Surprisingly well, actually. As the tiny blue mushroom, you command an ever-growing squad made up of various mushrooms, fungi, and mycelium. Each class of shroom has different tactics and abilities, such as directly attacking enemies with spores or healing your team. By the end of March of Shrooms, you’ll collect 40 different and distinct types of shrooms.

Your end goal is to stop the storms that keep wrecking mushroom-kind, but plenty of greedy mushrooms stand in your way. Your team needs to take down various enemy shrooms in each level to progress the adventure forward.

While the game looks simple, pixelated, and cutesy, there’s a lot of depth to building your team of brawlers. You can change the color of each class of shroom to make it unique—and unlock a ton of new colors as you go. Upgrading them and cultivating exactly how many of each type you command further increases the difficulty. How many healers do you really need to keep your tanks on the frontlines? What obstacles await in the next stage that could be counteracted with the various mushrooms at your disposal?

The number of options you have—and the slow unlocking of new types—means you never feel stuck on a level. If you’re finding it too hard, there is an easier mode, but the more challenging difficulty makes March of Shrooms into a surprisingly deep and complex RTS.

I fell in love with March of Shrooms before I even tried it, thanks to its combination of bright pastel colors and pixelated graphics. It was eye-catching and I wanted to play it, no matter the genre. But finding out it was a side-scrolling RTS? That made March of Shrooms an instant favorite.

I highly recommend trying it out if you’re a fan of strategy games—or just a fan of mushrooms. March of Shrooms is available on the Epic Games Store.