The most important ingredient to any roguelike is potential, whether it be the possibility of high-powered loot or the mystery of unseen areas and enemies. Potential is what keeps any player invested in the roguelike experience, since that experience is typically based around the random and unknown nature of the levels you play through.Sulfurenters the overcrowded market of roguelike titles with a ton of potential, but ultimately fails to deliver in its debut into early access.
Welcome to Purgatory
Sulfurcombines the gameplay of first-person shooter classics likeDoomandWolfensteinwith roguelike and extraction-shooter elements, following a preacher tasked with saving his congregation after being trapped in a purgatory-like realm of darkness by an evil witch. The gameplay sees the preacher following the witch into the cave, equipped with a pea-shooter-quality handgun to progress through the multiple levels of goblins and raiders that populate the caverns below. Players can find chests and drops from enemies in the cave that provide upgrades in the form of weapon enhancements, new guns, pieces of armor and consumables, but if you die in the cave, you’re sent all the way back to square one.
The struggle of the trusted leader who has to save the people who look up to him provides great motivation for progressing through the game
The artistic charm ofSulfuris what shines the most: NPCs provide funny voices and cheeky dialogue, the art style combines cute and cartoonish designs with brutal gore and three-dimensional settings and the struggle of the trusted leader who has to save the people who look up to him provides great motivation for progressing through the game. The only problem with that last statement is that progression inSulfuris devilishly difficult, sometimes seeming to be bordering on impossible.
Hellishly Unforgiving
There’s clearly a system in place for sourcing equipment and establishing advantages; the hub world is populated with vendors that sell new weapons and upgrades, items can be kept in a universally-consistent storage chest and the preacher is equipped with an amulet that allows him to teleport home with his inventory intact. But once you spend some time with the actual gameplay loop, it becomes apparent how underpowered all of these tools actually are.
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The cost of buying a new weapon (which will disappear if you end up perishing in the caves) is quite high, costing thousands of gold coins in comparison to the 100-400 that you collect in a typical run of the caves. This alone makes the presence of NPCs in the church feel more intimidating than hopeful, as you envision how much time it’s going to take to build up a stash of even low-tier gear. The storage chest that appears twice in the hub world is sparingly featured as a random spawn in the caves, and in our multiple hours of playing the game, we only saw the chest pop up twice inside the combat areas. This, combined with the amulet’s inability to be used unless you recharge it at the fourth layer of the caves, creates a devastating loop of failure that isn’t held up by the run-of-the-mill shooter mechanics.
Entering The Witch’s Cave
With the ability to find loot as limited as it is, the majority of gameplay is boiled down to trying to snipe enemies with a starter pistol, since they deal heavy damage quickly once they get close. Building a train of enemies at a distance by luring them into tight tunnels as I backtracked through the level became my main strategy, but even that level of safety was unrewarded when I realized that the corpses of slain enemies (which are about two-thirds of the height of a living enemy) still block incoming bullets, giving enemies a shield (and making ranged combatants especially difficult to deal with). The high time-to-kill for even the weakest enemy is frustrating when combined with their high movement speeds and agility (not to mention the fact that they make almost no sound, so if they’re outside your sight line they get a free shot at you). The balancing issues that plagueSulfurmake it hard to believe that players will stick around for long, as they directly block the player’s ability to see what the game has to offer in even the earliest stages of progression.
If potential is the name of the game, thenSulfuris a project that has plenty
Even with all of these issues,Sulfurstill shows a ton of promise for its future: there’s a wide variety of items and enhancements that are present, which is only made more impressive by the diverse (but currently underused) crafting system. The charm of the characters and overall sense of humor is irresistible, and was the driving force in why we kept returning for more runs through the gauntlet. If potential is the name of the game, thenSulfuris a project that has plenty, but only time will tell if that potential will get the realization and fulfillment it deserves (alas, so is the tale of the early access indie game).
Sulfuris available in Early Access on Steam now.
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