After burning out on approximately 17 billion indie roguelikes between the years of 2011 and 2018, I swore to myself that I’d never be swayed again by a procedurally generated dungeon crawler that I’ll never finish. I’m breaking that rule for Sulfur, an upcoming FPS featured in today’s PC Gaming Show that’s incorporating the best parts of extraction games like Hunt: Showdown and Dark and Darker into a singleplayer roguelite. Watch the trailer above.
To be fair, I’d probably play more roguelites these days if they looked this cool. I’m smitten with Sulfur’s flat-shaded environments and enemies that look like they crawled out of a 2010s Cartoon Network show. You could almost mistake it for one of those colloquially-coined “cozy games” that appear by the dozens on Steam, but Sulfur’s true nature is revealed the first time you shoot half of an archer’s face off with a high-caliber revolver.
After playing a short Sulfur demo in March, I could immediately tell the developers Perfect Random and I are into the same shooters: full-auto guns kick like a milsim, reload animations are involved and meticulous like in Hunt, and they can be fitted with attachments on the fly like Escape From Tarkov.
There’s a lot of Tarkov in Sulfur’s loot, too. Everything from food, guns, armor, and enchantment scrolls take up space in your grid-based inventory, which is sure to make players answer hard questions like “what do I want more, two bowls of porridge or a helmet?”
Based on the trailer and Steam page, it looks like players will build a loadout from their collected gear before entering a level. If you die, everything you had on you is lost, but survive and you keep anything you found along the way. It sounds like a minor distinction from other roguelites, but it’s the fully randomized resets of Spelunky 2 and Noita that kept me from sticking with those games. Maintaining a canon of collected loot is a great way to track progression while always being vulnerable to setbacks when fully-kitted runs end in disaster.
Sulfur doesn’t have a release date or a demo yet, but you can wishlist it now on Steam.