I’ve never played a game quite like Sunderfolk, but I have played a lot of games that are a little bit like Sunderfolk.
The debut game from developer Secret Door (which my colleague Eric Switzer also got a chance to check out last year) has elements you’ve definitely seen before. There’s turn-based tactical combat that will be familiar for fans of Baldur’s Gate 3, XCOM, or Fire Emblem. In between quests, you return to your town to stock up on supplies, including meals that allow you to carry passive buffs forward into combat, a la Monster Hunter. It’s set in Arden, a village entirely populated by anthropomorphic animals, which should get the Redwall fans hyped. And it’s designed to be played cooperatively, with friends, over many sessions, like a digital Dungeons & Dragons.
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Thinking Outside The Jackbox
The glue, however, that makes all those odds and ends into a cohesive whole is Jackbox Games. The devs behind the Jackbox Party Packs are an odd influence for a fantasy RPG. Each Jackbox game has the player use their phone as a controller. You load the game up on your PS5 (or any of the near endless platforms where Jackbox games are available) then log in to a lobby with your party. The Jackbox games experienced a massive spike in popularity early on in the pandemic because friends and family separated by lockdowns could join a game together and make each other laugh like they were in the same room.
I love these games, and Sunderfolk is taking that phone-as-controller scheme and applying it to a more game-y kind of game. Instead of logging in, playing a few rounds, and logging out, Sunderfolk players will work their way through a campaign that, according to technical designer Jerrick Flores, can clock in anywhere from 20 to 40 hours. A game this full-featured being comprehensible on an iPhone screen is possible thanks to some innovative controls and, when I sat down with Sunderfolk at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week, I was surprised by how seamlessly it all worked.
Sunderfolk Offers Seamless Adventuring
Everything I needed to do was easy to accomplish on an iPhone screen. To choose an attack, I simply swiped through cards on a provided (and, thankfully, fully charged) phone, then picked the move I wanted to do. Those cards, handily, included all the information I needed to know. On the grid-based battlefield, I could touch the screen to draw my archer’s movement path. The game brings the ease of the touch screen in for smaller flourishes, too. When we encountered some friendly grubs who wanted to join our fight, each party member got the chance to name one. Mine could spit fire, so I cheekily named it Tabasco.
That got a laugh at the table, highlighting the degree to which the game is channeling the social fun of playing at the tabletop, but with the video game ease that means all the annoying, tedious bits are taken care of for you.
“We have a lot of inspirations from tabletop,” says Flores, citing D&D and Gloomhaven. “Our whole goal with this is to find a way to take a lot of those games that take a lot of time to get into and see if we can almost streamline that for you and your group to actually start to play.”
The feeling that you’re playing at the tabletop is further heightened by virtual DM, Anjali Bhimani. The prolific actress brings a different characterization to each voiced character in the game, including the narrator.
Odd pairings like this can be creatively inspiring in a way that little else can. I wouldn’t have expected it, but it seems like D&D and Jackbox are two great tastes that taste great together. We’ll know for sure when Sunderfolk launches April 23rd on Steam, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Switch.
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