Sulfur is a clever machination, combining elements of roguelike games and extraction shooters to create a truly unique single-player experience. Pair this with the game’s unique style, and you’re in for a great time. While still in Early Access and with a few kinks to iron out, it’s starting with a great foundation and has certainly become one of my new favorites.
Sulfur begins with a cinematic view of our protagonist, a mysterious figure we’ll soon know as the Priest, chasing a cartoonishly witchy witch, complete with broomstick, as she delves into a cave. Behind us, a church burns on the horizon, set ablaze by the witch, and armed with nothing but a pistol and a mysterious amulet, as we set out to seek revenge.
As I alluded to before, Sulfur is a clever combination of the roguelike genre and a sort of single-player extraction shooter. Roguelikes as a concept should be pretty familiar to our readers by now: enter a procedurally generated set of levels and collect procedurally generated loot along the way. Return to a base of operations after your inevitable death to prepare and become stronger before heading back out.
Extraction shooters probably won’t be as familiar. They operate under a similar set of rules and design philosophies and can probably be considered a subgenre of roguelikes. With prime examples being Marauders and Escape From Tarkov, the goal is simple: you load into a map, loot around for procedurally generated stashes of gear (including anything from better weapons to objects with no purpose beyond monetary value), and then attempt to “extract” with your loot before you’re killed. These games feature persistent inventories, meaning anything you leave with you keeps, and when you die, you drop everything.
Therein lie the key mechanics and gameplay loop of Sulfur. You begin each run at your church, a small hub full of interesting characters and shops where you can spend your accumulated Sulf Con. After preparing your loadout from either your stash or a merchant, you descend into the caves below and fight through procedurally generated levels on your way to the witch. Along the way, you’ll find objects that either heal you, provide better chances of killing your enemies (guns and gear, most often), or simply have a high intrinsic value.
All of these objects are procedurally spawned throughout levels, with better loot near the end, and you can use your amulet at any time to return home to sell or stash your items at the cost of starting over. Often, the biggest question is whether it’s worth leaving now with your goods and forgoing future loot or risking dying later and losing everything.
Though the extraction-shooter loop can be inherently frustrating, with far more lost on death and far fewer rewards for dying than in your typical roguelike, it’s a fun gameplay loop. It gives a sense of value to everything you find, especially rare and powerful guns, and creates the question of whether something is worth coveting or if its value comes from its use. The game tempts you to use your guns more instead of just hoarding them by having proficiency levels that unlock by killing enemies with them.
This is a solid gameplay loop, but what will probably jump out at you before the mechanics is Sulfur’s style.
Sulfer features a delightfully dark take on the children’s cartoon aesthetic. Everything looks decidedly like Adventure Time or a Hallmark card, with cartoonish creatures resembling old Halloween decorations aimed at children—the kind you’d find strung up at a discount store or painted lazily onto a plastic pumpkin.
Juxtaposing this cute style dramatically is the level of blood and gore. The Priest is on a righteous mission of wrath, and the cute little ghosts and goblins are actually the accursed minions of hell. Despite their cartoonishness, you will blast holes through them and tear them apart, often literally carving carcasses to harvest body parts to sell later. Bullets and blood fly indiscriminately, creating great goopy pools of satisfying gore as you unleash hell in what could be called a TV-Y7 Army of Darkness.
That being said, there are aspects of the art style I don’t like. I feel like the cartoonish look is underutilized in the three-dimensional aspects of the game. The enemies are 2D creatures, like in a Doom mod, and fit the cartoonish look perfectly. However, the Priest, his guns, and the environment are all 3D-modeled and textured to make it look like they belong on a 2D plane. It looks okay, but I often find the 3D elements fighting the style, and I wish more could be done to make these areas match the game’s look.
Sulfur is in a pretty solid state in its current Early Access build. However, some changes could make the game more enjoyable.
Most noticeably, the game’s maps suffer from a “hole” issue, where enemies will sometimes fall through the map and either respawn nearby or disappear completely. This can also happen to players, and it’s not fun to randomly slip through the earth’s crust into nothingness and lose all your gear.
I also found that map generation can be peculiar. Maybe it’s just me, but I often felt as though a level would generate a plethora of paths that went nowhere. Platforming segments would often appear and then lead directly into a wall or be interrupted by an unjumpable gap or object, making the platforming itself impossible.
Pros:
- A clever combination of roguelike and extraction-shooter elements
- A great cartoonish style mixed with visceral gore
Cons:
- Level generation issues that need patching before full release
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