Sunderfolk’s hands-on: Comfortable Co-op RPG streaming desktop magic into everyone’s home
My adventurers party walked into a spider-infected cave, and my friends and I started chatting about strategies on every hero’s attack plan – and then we jumped into the competition by controlling the action by phone.
This is Sunderfolk, a new role-playing game and debut of Studio Secret Door. Produced by veterans of Blizzard, Riot Games and Fantasy Desktops, such as Descent: Dark, Sunderfolk’s legend brings board game night to modern video games. It is available for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch for $50.
The game looks traditional enough, with up to four players choosing six animal adventurers between packing various skills to protect their town. The game’s battles and actions work on the shared screen, but the novelty is that everyone pulls up their phones to move the characters and finds combat information.
“[Sunderfolk] Game Director Erin Marek said the game is designed to attract fantasy desktop veterans, but for complex board games that require manual deep dives to make those stand out.
To this end, the Secret Door team started with the concept of “TV DND”, as the studio head Chris Sigaty explained: “Like [Dungeons and Dragons] Meet Jack Box. “That’s a party game, and everyone jumps into the phone to play, and it aptly describes the medium that Sunderfolk tries to blend. The team hopes to bring the friendship of the sofa into the digital game, all of which is blended into an evocative fantasy world.
While Secret Door is friendly and can invite me into the discord of contact with other players, I know I have to experience the game with my own desktop group. My thirties and thirties fighting fixed Gad cadres have addressed movements in the RPG system such as dungeon world, sprawl, blades in the dark, quiet year and stonetop, all avoiding the stable elements of dungeons and dungeons and dragons for a more simplified way to play the character. This makes them an excellent sample player for Sunderfolk.
I tried to play the game myself, but like every classic RPG campaign, we face all the greatest desktop villains: the schedule. No one could meet that night. However, Sunderfolk’s setup allows everyone to play remotely: we just sit on our phones in our respective houses while we are watching the same screen and log in to the game.
This is also the genius of Sunderfolk: all players have a big screen. At any time, players can view their phone screen as a thumb pad to move the cursor to find details of enemies or battlefield features (such as healing shrines or exploding rocks). But this also allows players to point and gesture around the map to plan and coordinate movements. We might be sitting in a house dozens of miles apart, but it feels like my friends and I gathered at the table in person.
Flow Sunderfolk to the entire party
However, since my party wasn’t in the same place, I used a clever workaround to run the game on the PS5 and through the discord playback of our group of friends, which everyone tweaked.
Admittedly, this is a bit challenging on the PS5, which doesn’t allow you to detach from within the console from local – instead, I had to use the online discovered workaround to run my PS5 on my PC using the remote playback app and then stream that window through Discord. Complex! There are other options, such as streaming to YouTube or Twitch, but these require additional steps before starting broadcasting to the masses. Note that the Xbox Series X allows you to stream directly to Discord, and so does the PC player.
This shows the bilateral nature of Sunderfolk’s unique setup, but at least the trouble is my last, my friends don’t need to download additional copies of the game – a copy will work for the entire party. All they had to do was download the free Sunderfolk app, watch my stream, scan the QR code on the screen with their phone to log in to the event, and we participated in the competition.
Sunderfolk’s six playable anthropomorphic animal heroes, from left to right: Artificer, Bard, Ranger, Berserker, Ranger, Pyromancer. All are cute, all the designs and actions have a lot of personality.
How to play Sunderfolk’s Phone Control RPG
Once logged into our campaign, three friends and I chose the quartet character from six animal hero choices and gave them stupid names, as well as the tradition of the desktop. One friend chose the barbaric polar bear (named Bearzerker), the other one was the Lamb Ranger (Big Lamb), the third was Raven Spellcaster (Ravnabtmagic), and I chose the Bat Bard (Bat Stevens).
Like any good desktop RPG, the event is open in the tavern. Here we learn basic mechanics and run through our early move choices, each character is different, and then spill it out into the proper brawl outside. Local ogres descend on the town to attack and rob, but our brave heroes knock them down.
Although combat is familiar with fantasy RPGs, such as using different attacks to weaken the enemy, Sunderfolk places great importance on moving on the battlefield. Our casters teleport around (again, “grafted enemies,” and I exchanged locations in the area with the Bat Bard and sold electricity in the area, encouraging different play styles without ever staying.
All of this led to this moment. If you’ve ever played desktop RPG, you might remember the first time you suddenly find out you can do anything. It’s memorable when you try something so spectacular, successful or failed. At Sunderfolk, our next encounter leads us to chase the ogres to a bridge – party members find attack or athletic ability, which removes us from the edge.
“We stole a little from the tabletop game where things never happen,” Marek said. “You have that moment, telling stories with your friends and trying to explain it to others and they don’t understand because they’re not there.”
There are things we can’t do, and regular tabletop games will allow, such as trying to talk to ogres or bribing them away. Sunderfolk trades with fewer but still powerful possibilities – just ask me about the parties of men in their thirties, cheer each other, bring enemies into wild blue yonder, and then simplify the system with compiled video game rules. From personal experience, having the game deal with all monsters, mission progress, etc is a pleasure, which means our regular dungeon masters can join in too.
When we finished our first adventure, we chatted with Townsfolk and Really’s relationships, did some shopping and unlocked new abilities – standard RPG stuff, all wrapped up in a 2-hour course, and I later learned that this was the target time for the secret door team (one hour each night, and every two quests brings a level of new skills). Although I had a great time in the game, everything worked out smoothly and I was impressed – even if I never used my phone to play the game this way.
Pointing mechanisms are used to control characters and make gestures on shared screens – for example, to develop an attack plan or make suggestions to friends.
Design a new way to play old games
Sunderfolk’s team is full of people who grab games from other platforms and media to adapt to playing on inconspicuous smartphones. Prior to joining Secret Door, Marek worked on Wild Rift (League of Legends on your phone), while Sigaty worked on Hearthstone (digital card game on PC and phone). Sunderfolk’s campaign designer Kara Centell-Dunk has more than a decade of experience in tabletop gaming – including working in a job of descent: Legends from King of Rings: Journeys in the Middle Ages, these smartphone apps have assistants for smartphone apps to help play games.
Of the interview calls with the three secret door creators above, only the fourth did not work at the intersection between the phone and the desktop – despite submitting fantasy art on Monster Handbook and Magic, he simply never played Daren Bader, the artistic director of the Dungeon, Dragon or Desktop. “I was the perfect guinea pig for the team,” Bader explained. His transformation to a tabletop gamer during his development in Sunderfolk was a proof of concept.
“My favorite thing is that we created the games I want to play to tell you the truth,” Bud said.
As Sigaty describes, designing a game that will be “TV DND” is a process. Gamers won’t look down on their controllers, mouse, and keyboard when playing games, but Sunderfolk will have a lot of essential information on the phone app – the team found players staring at their phone instead of on-screen actions. The solution is in another TV implementation.
“Hasiba Arshad, one of our UX/UI designers, is actually looking at the Apple TV remote, and how they use the paradigm… She came up with the idea, what if you actually control the cursor?” Marek said – almost like drawing with a drawing pad.
It took years of evolution and a lot of game testing with friends and family to get the controls right (even in the release form, the app on the phone tells the player to look up when important gameplay happens on the home screen). The rest of the design took some time to perfect it, like lined up each move for players to tap and slide between them, like they were holding a card – and then swipe the card they wanted to start turning upwards, like a kind of skeuomorthic Motion.
“The thing I like the underground approach is actually putting some guardrails on us,” said Daren Bader, artistic director of Secret Door. “We have to think more about what we can do in the underground, which is a feeling that is different and unique, but that’s what people will recognize.”
If the game is not having fun, all this work will form a novel proof of concept, but fact. It’s not the most complex RPG start, but is designed to speed up – as Centell-Dunk explains, the philosophy of the game is the simple part, and when combined, it becomes complicated. So, will I find that the merchant loot that spiders scattered as I hit them scattered? This can be combined with other athletic abilities to gain a tactical advantage.
When my friends and I finished our second session, we designed light and mushrooms, friendly animals and vicious ogres in the terrible world of the vibrant underground world – we called it a night. However, my friends who tested my desktop were not recognized in my desktop before they asked us when we would play the game next.
Centell-Dunk is most proud of us: the boss fights and the system she makes for them.
“I hope the players also like being crushed by our boss,” Centell-Dunk said.
Watch the following: I participated in the Public Nintendo Switch 2 experience
