Sunderfolk review – A delightful strategy game that’s made for everyone

Sunderfolk is a charming dungeon-crawling campaign game from Secret Door, one of two internal studios at Dreamhaven. Last year we had the chance to try out an early build of the game, and with the full release coming April 23, I’ve now been playing my way through the finished thing in order to deliver my verdict.

What is Sunderfolk?

Sunderfolk is a dungeon crawling game designed for couch co-op fun. It’s heavily inspired by the smash hit board game Gloomhaven and plays like the digital version of a non-existent tabletop title.

Sunderfolk is set in an underground world inhabited by animal people. It’s a family-friendly game that feels a bit like a virtual DnD campaign. Each player takes on the role of a unique character with their own abilities and skills, and together you tackle missions and fight dangerous monsters, before heading back to town to upgrade your capabilities and mingle with NPCs.

These missions see you working to best foes and complete objectives in turn-based, strategic gameplay, moving around and bashing ogres on a hex-based map.

Though the game can be played solo, it’s advertised as ‘better with friends’ and supports co-op with up to four players. While online play is possible, Secret Door’s vision is for Sunderfolk to be a couch co-op game, experienced in person with a group of family or friends.

That links to one of the most unique things about Sunderfolk: its control scheme. Whether on PC or console, the game is played using your smartphones as controllers, something I’ve only ever encountered before in a very different genre – the party games of Jackbox.

This lets Sunderfolk send personalized information to each player, but it’s also used as a handy personal cheat sheet, allowing players to look up any skill, enemy, or environmental feature without having to take control of the shared main screen. Similarly, in the downtime between missions, it means players can take time customizing their characters without everyone having to watch.

Diving into the action

Sunderfolk’s gameplay is great, and that’s largely down to the strength and diversity of its playable characters. There are six in total, and each one enables a very different playstyle, with plenty of depth.

You can be a tanky bear who can heal or shield themself and gets up close and personal with the enemy using moves that pull them in or pull him to them.

You can be a salamander pyromancer, who creates fire hazards around the map, and wants to dive into them to fuel up devastating attacks. Or you can be an arcanist bird, who builds up mana over multiple turns to unleash some of the most powerful skills in the whole game.

Each hero starts with three abilities and one passive feature, but you quickly unlock more. In total, each has six abilities, plus an ultimate, but you decide which three powers to bring into each fight. It’s a tried and true formula that provides a good amount of complexity and customisation, while avoiding choice paralysis and turns that drag on on the actual battlemap.

Also borrowed from Gloomhaven is the concept of fate decks. These have the same function as dice in an RPG: you draw one each time you hit an enemy, and they add a bit of randomness to attacks, giving them positive or negative effects you can’t completely plan for.

Each character and monster has their own unique fate deck, and you can unlock new cards and customize yours to suit your own build. It’s a great feature, and while its origins are obvious, I’m honestly surprised that more games haven’t joined in on pinching this mechanic by now.

Despite the symmetry in how they work, each character has a very different level of complexity. The batty bard for instance has a passive feature that creates random buff pick-ups whenever she swaps places with an ally, and a lot of her abilities relate to movement and positioning. With this character on your team you’ll often want to chat at the start of each turn about turn order and setting up the perfect attacks.

Meanwhile, if you play the bear berserker you can just wade into the fight and get stuck in, while the antelopoid ranger works similarly but conversely – her player can just stay away from the fight and snipe from range.

Enemies are varied too. All have their own quirks, like spiders who leap away after taking damage, or skeletons that reform after dying. You can also check each one’s actions and exact capabilities using the handy mobile app interface.

Having started two campaigns with different player counts, I confess I wasn’t able to delve as deep into Sunderfolk’s 40 mission campaign as I would’ve liked to, but I was impressed by what I saw. Each scenario is handcrafted, with unique elements and objectives, beyond just ‘bash some heads in’. You might be defending a door aided by bugs with varied abilities, or searching webs for stolen supplies, and there are generally extra optional objectives to complete as well.

You can’t beat every mission in one playthrough however. The game is broken into an ‘acts’ structure, and between each one you’ll pick a certain number of side missions to complete before you’re whisked onto the next arc of the story. To me, it usually seemed one mission was left unexplored. You might see this as a limitation, but it’s clearly intended to provide some built in replayability. Levels take 20-30 minutes to complete, so a campaign should last a decent chunk of time.

Home again

If two-thirds of Sunderfolk takes place in the missions themselves, the final third comes in when you return home, bruised but victorious, to the game’s settlement hub. This is the main place where you soak up the worldbuilding and writing of the game. So what’s that like?

It’s pretty cute, is my not-very-controversial opinion. Sunderfolk is clearly designed to be a family-friendly game, and the tone skirts dangerously close to the saccharine at times, but there’s an undercurrent of light humor throughout that kept me engaged. Plus you can be mean to people, if you’re some sort of monster!

The character designs and writing are good as well. Most NPCs have a pretty clear archetype they’re playing up, but I found them varied and surprising enough to keep me interested. A selection of favorites include a bug that communicates in nothing but chirps, a tsundere hyena, a shady mole smuggler/innkeeper, and a cowardly pangolin. You gradually build up relationships with these characters, and depending on how much they like you, they’ll give you useful rewards.

It’s not just fun and games in town – while your friends are busy chatting, you can spend time preparing for your next mission, swapping in new skills, or customizing your strategy further spending currency at various buildings. You can craft trinkets that give you an extra instant-use, one-time ability, meals that give you an extra passive buff, or buy new fate cards at a fortune teller, and so on.

While I personally wasn’t blown away by what I saw of the game’s story, I certainly enjoyed its cosy vibes, and I think many will adore it.

Under the hood

When I first heard about Sunderfolk’s unique mobile mechanism I had my doubts. I’m not a fan of companion apps in boardgaming, after all, and this sounded similar. But in practice it’s actually great. It provides the ability to switch from couch co-op, with everyone looking at the same screen, to individual devices when it’s time to sort out all the personal gubbins and character progression stuff that a DM would probably ask a player to think about in-between sessions. And it helps keep a highly strategic game easy-breezy, by allowing players to double check stuff in their own time.

Plus, there are some delightful opportunities presented by the system. The moments when I was most charmed by Sunderfolk’s story aspect was whenever I was asked to name something. The game will sometimes present you with these chances to title something in the game, and whether it’s a type of enemy or an imaginary money-making scheme, I was always delighted.

Because these names will then pop up in conversations or interactions that your friends have, and you’ll be able to laugh about the silly things you picked. Honestly, if anything I wanted to see more of this playfulness – it would’ve pushed the game up another notch to lean in harder here.

I was also pleasantly surprised by how robust Sunderfolk is in letting you customize your campaign. You can have players drop in or out mid session, assign heroes to different players or remove one from your party altogether. Secret Door is right that the game is best experienced in multiplayer, however, as if you control all four characters yourself you’ll often encounter repeated dialogue.

You can also change the difficulty mid-campaign, turning the game from a casual beat-em-up experience that doesn’t require too much thought to a hardcore strategy title where every turn needs planning and coordination. Actually I was surprised by how gruelling the higher difficulty levels were, given how cutesy the tone of the game is. In true keeping with a more casual experience, however, Sunderfolk lets you skip a mission altogether if it’s giving you grief.

Overall I think Sunderfolk is brilliant, and will suit a wide range of players. At lower difficulty levels, it can be a great way to introduce people of all ages to the wonderful world of strategy games (both on screen or on the tabletop) and at higher levels it presents a challenge that will tax even the expert gamer. Its world is colorful and fun, and its roster of varied, highly customizable characters all feel great to get to grips with.

Overall, it’s obvious Secret Door had a very clear vision of what it wanted to achieve with Sunderfolk, and it has knocked it out of the park.

Source: Wargamer