Sunderfolk is a gripping co-op strategy game from former Blizzard talent that wants to “bring back game night” – using your phone
I will not lie to you, gentle reader. When I first laid eyes on Secret Door’s Sunderfolk, while lurking to the rear of a gaggle of journomancers at a preview event last week, I let out an ostentatious sigh. Fortunately, I still mask up to preview events, and am thus free to adopt all kinds of snotty facial expressions without being set upon by burly PRs and shoved into the minifridge for later disposal. To sum it up, Sunderfolk is a hex and turn-based 2-4 player digital boardgame with fantasy animal characters and deckbuilding elements, reminiscent of Gloomhaven. Conceived during the pandemic lockdowns as a way to “bring back game night”, but without the traditional 30-minute unboxing ritual, it’s played on the big screen but controlled using a dedicated smartphone app, with players stroking and swiping to move characters and play cards.
It’s not like I necessarily object to all these things. I like boardgames (current favourite, Cosmic Encounters). I like cardgames (current favourite, Fungi). I think hexes are the ideal form of tessellation, and as a survivor of Farthing Woods, I’ve always been vulnerable to the charms of anthropomorphic critters. Still, Sunderfolk feels rather homely of concept and styling for the first game from Secret Door, whose parent company Dreamhaven was founded by several Blizzard alumni including former Blizzboss Mike Morhaime and former StarCraft 2 lead producer Chris Sigaty, now Secret Door’s studio head. If I’d seen Sunderfolk on Steam, I might have spent a moment admiring the character art, but I probably wouldn’t have wishlisted. So it’s just as well that in the hands Sunderfolk is very good fun, if not yet a transformative hit. I like it well enough that I am prepared to commit the ultimate sacrifice and install a new app on my phone.
So, who are these “folk” that have been “sundered”? Gather by the fireside, children, and I’ll begin: Sunderfolk takes place in an underground world where a community of folksy medieval wildlife live by the light of an enormous crystal. Sadly, the catacombs surrounding their placid village are full of PG-13 horrors, such as giant spiders, scrawny ogres and skeleton dogs. You play one of six heroes, each a bestial spin on a familiar RPG class. The village is your base, where you’ll buy gear and upgrades and accept missions into the caverns beyond. I honestly can’t recall if there’s a core plot, as such: the key thing to know is that the entire English script is energetically voiced by Anjali Bhimani, aka Symmetra from Overwatch, who puts on various accents and is generally the kind of dungeon master who needs to lay off the Mountain Dew.
As for the missions themselves, the key thing to know is that Sunderfolk does a wonderful job of being a combat puzzler that often requires serious coordination to achieve objectives against superior enemy numbers, while also being a game where you can troll your pals a bit. Players and enemy movements are grouped into rounds. Within your round, it’s up to players to decide who goes next, and when I say “decide” I naturally mean “fight like alley cats for dominance, only for your infant niece to play a card ‘accidentally’ and ruin everything”. On a similar note, the player group can only perform one character’s ultimate ability per round, the basis for further raging quarrels as to whether my ultimate is more ultimate than yours.
Beyond that, there’s the ability to move other player’s characters around for either strategic gain or to be a nuisance. Plot a route through an ally, and you’ll shove them into the hex behind. Many abilities also inflict knockback on both foe and friend, and you can steal each other’s loot drops. The classes, meanwhile, are capable of delicate tactical feats, but they all have an edge of mischief to them. There’s a salamander who mixes DPS with terrain control, performing AOE belches that set hexes alight. Being surrounded by burning hexes is fantastic for the salamander, who can guzzle up his own fire to build a multiplier. It’s less great for other characters, who suddenly find their escape routes blocked by flame.
The mission maps I played were all both digestibly screen-sized, and woven around simple but effective terrain or enemy variables that could be manipulated to either scientifically yank victory from the jaws of defeat, or shove your weasel assassin buddy further into them. That weasel has it coming. During one of our co-op preview bouts, the weasel player used a multi-strike ability to teleport around and land glancing hits on several giant spiders at once. When giant spiders in Sunderfolk are hit, they skitter away randomly to another hex. In this case, all the spiders ended up next to me.
The mission in question was about retrieving some stolen supplies from a spider’s egg sac. This involved cutting open all the other egg sacs, some of which were, as you’d imagine, home to other spiders. The challenge, then, was to only hack open a certain percentage of sacs at once, to minimise the odds of being swamped. This, we triumphantly did not do. We had slightly better luck trying to rescue some kind of industrial beetle from ogres. Once sprung from its cage, the beetle had to be stood next to and steered to stop it running into lava during its turn. This, we triumphantly did not do. I blame the bird mystic, in this case. Bird mystics in Sunderfolk exist to fulfil three broad purposes – slowly harvesting mana for lategame spells, summoning decoys, and avoiding melee contact. Our bird player, however, laboured under the impression that she was Falco Lombardi, and got herself all messed up by skeleton dogs.
All this might sound too baroque and role-plaguey for the “fun for all the family” experience Sunderfolk is trying to cultivate. Later boss battles turn up the heat by having the boss act after each player’s turn, and there are also character weapons that must be primed by, say, having allies stand next to you.
Still, the smartphone interface makes it fairly intuitive. During your turn, you shuffle cards on your screen and stroke vertically to play them. Each card is actually a series of actions, which can be skipped individually by swiping right – move three hexes, perform an attack, move another hex, etcetera. The constraint is that they have to be performed or skipped in descending order. This guides your approach – in the case of the card I just described, it’s the foundation for a simple hit-and-run assault. But skipping actions lets you tailor each card to the situation. Once you perform an attack, it’s subject to the whim of the Fate deck, which rolls a die to determine the damage. You can customise the effects of different Fate dice rolls between missions.
The smartphone interface reminds me of forgotten “auxiliary screen” devices and software such as Wii U and Xbox SmartGlass, but when I spoke to him after the hands-on, Secret Door’s boss Chris Sigaty said he “hadn’t really thought about” these hoary old parallels. Sunderfolk takes more inspiration from smartphone party game platform Jackbox, and exploits how fluent people now are with touchscreens at large. “We use these devices to do these sorts of things – scrolling, reading information, typing in information constantly,” Sigaty commented. “So we’re all very well educated in this already.” Game director Erin Marek, meanwhile, cited the influence of Apple’s TV remote apps for iPad and iPhone.
Still, a lot of the language Secret Door use recalls Nintendo and Microsoft’s bygone efforts to transform distracting handheld screens into a complementary element of their games. “Most of the time with my own kids, as an example, they’ll have their phones out in a negative way – the TV’s there and they’re looking at some social media thing or something,” Sigaty went on. “And I want them to be immersed in what we’re doing, and be present. When you’re playing this game, your phone is not being used for those things. It’s being used for something that is a shared experience, where you need to be collaborative, you need to be talking and so, ideally, it helps people break away from that that other escapism, that seems to be very prevalent for folks, who are always on social media doing whatever.”
They’ve also thought about spectator functionality: for example, letting bystanders use the game’s pointer functionality to doodle on the map. But with a team of 28 people, there isn’t capacity for that right now. Sigaty told me that he had misgivings about limiting the player headcount to four, suggesting that two to four players is the norm for most boardgames and therefore, that Sunderfolk could fill a niche by supporting a larger group. In practice, though, having five or more people made things too fiddly. Both Malek and Sigaty are hopeful that Sunderfolk might be the first of many smartphone-meets-TV games from Secret Door. “Ideally, we’re doing a lot of games like this,” Sigaty told me. “I’m very passionate about it.”
Gloomhaven, Xbox SmartGlass and all the rest of my incoherent referencing aside, Sunderfolk could pass for one of Blizzard’s creations. The art is redolent of Warcraft and Hearthstone – stylised and storybook but with just enough heft and teeth and shadow that it doesn’t feel outright cartoonish. Dreamhaven’s marketing department have emphasised the comparison, but Sigaty resisted it. “People say ‘it’s Blizzard 2.0’ and it’s like, no, it’s completely something new,” he told me. “I think we can’t help but be built on values and insights from that time, right? We learned certain lessons – some of them that I’m not very good at even articulating, but feelings about how you interact with the community, and how you form a community, and what you want to pay attention to in the quality level of the game.”
Sigaty traced a little of Sunderfolk’s spirit to his time at Blizzcon, “where you’re watching the best players in the world eat and play, and for me, I would feel chills being in the audience watching that level of skill”. But he added that Sunderfolk was conceived after he and the studio’s former Blizzard staff had left. “I think a game like this couldn’t have been made probably at Blizzard – I didn’t pitch this game or anything there. They have needs that have to meet the equivalent of World of Warcraft.”