Must know
What is it? A curious mix of JRPG with point-and-click adventure set in a very Deathloop-esque 70s near future
Expect to pay: N/A
Publication date: October 13
Developer: BKOM
Publisher: Squad 17
Judged by: Intel i5 12600K, Nvidia RTX 3070, 32GB RAM
Multiplayer? no
Clutch: Steam page (opens in new tab)
The trend in newer RPGs (I think Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin 2) is to rejuvenate yourself between battles so you can focus on the tactical details of each battle. Sunday Gold will have none of that. The three chapter raids are a battle of attrition. You manage the health, stress, action points and consumables of the group members, solve classic adventure item collecting puzzles and fight corporate security with no real breaks. It’s like someone put an old-fashioned, hardcore RPG into a Sierra adventure. While the combat itself is fine, solving puzzles takes advantage of the limitations and added intensity of dwindling resource management.
The story is very Final Fantasy 7: You have the corporate executive and his secret labs wiping out an over-industrialized city, the rag-tag group of freedom fighters – complete with disgruntled loner and powerhouse with a heart of gold – and a secret base to return to. turn under a dive bar. It’s red meat, classic video game stuff in a 70s sci-fi setting.
I love comic books, but it’s that relentless attrition game that makes Sunday Gold really exciting. Your characters use the same pool of action points (AP) in exploration mode and in combat. Finishing a scout turn opens up a chance for a random encounter. That means it’s possible to get into a loop where you end a combat encounter without having an AP left, end your scout turn early to refresh those points and activate immediately another random encounter.
Those who fight
The JRPG-style combat is otherwise typical: there’s a rock-paper-scissors resistance system, enemy armor to wear out and time your best attacks against, and status effects like “bleed” (damage over time) and “broken” ( slower AP regen) for you and your opponents. The persistence of health and AP between combat and exploration adds an element of long-term strategies to any battle that elevates the whole. I found that the timing of battle decisions was such that I was done with max health and AP for the next exploration phase, it won over ending battles as soon as possible. Pyrrhic wins are a no-go – ending a battle with low health or AP would mess me up royally for the next scout turn.
Sunday Gold’s addition of scarcity and stress to classic adventure gameplay is refreshing in today’s field. It’s innovative in the same vein as fellow 2022 adventure/RPG Citizen Sleeper, which tasked you with making the most of everyday dice to live your best life on a space station. These two games offer an alternative path to the way PC Gamer’s perennial favorite, Disco Elysium, blended the genres of RPG and adventure. Unlike Disco Elysium’s embrace of build crafting and skill checks, Sunday Gold and Citizen Sleeper are all about thinking and using those scarce resources effectively.
The result is something very special: hardcore RPG resource management like you’d find in Baldur’s Gate or a single-digit Final Fantasy, but in a point-and-click adventure. I couldn’t just click anywhere and try every action prompt I had at my disposal until something new happened, like I did in the Monkey Island games when I was a kid, because my group would run out of action points and would are torn apart by random encounters. I had to think about the puzzles and weigh each action instead of relying on brute force.
There’s a solid piece about two-thirds that exemplifies that tight, rushed puzzle solution. Your party gets stuck in a classic Star Wars trash compactor situation and you need to find four keys hidden in the room. You get a shared pool of about 25 action points to spend before the trap sets and wipes out your team, but there are more than that many points of things to do and problems to sort out. The keys themselves are on high shelves or locked behind an electric door. The room also contains valuable optional loot such as a shotgun for Frank, your DPSer. However, there are also a few messy actions like shoulder control of the door or fruitless shooting at it. On my first try, I threw everything on it and failed. Chastised, I reloaded and really thought about my way through the puzzle.
Sunday Gold really hit my gamer instincts when I was looking in a corpse for an ID card early in the game. My greedy impulse was to loot every pocket for health potions, but feeling a corpse understandably drained my character’s morale meter (going too low introduces deliberate interface glitches and a strict time limit for making combat decisions). It also turned out that this brutally murdered corporate stooge had no small keys, natural armor amulets, or enchanted short swords to make that moral blow worth it. Once I found the plot-critical keycard, I should have ignored those completist instincts and be on my way. Sunday Gold hit me, dangled a carrot, then hit me with my hand as I reached for it, and you know what? I deserved it.
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Sunday Gold has a bit of that old Sierra moon logic to some of its puzzles, to its detriment. There’s that adventure game chapter of machines with a missing valve that you have to get somewhere else before screwing it in to use it for a valve-like purpose – seriously, who keeps these things anywhere but where they spin it? It’s not always well marked when a puzzle is limited to one room and when you may have to go back to collect the necessary components, leaving a few game rules that had me clicking through a series of rooms until something, well, clicked – exactly the kind of behavior Sunday Gold is at its best when it discourages through its AP system.
That occasional muddyness made me think that the only progress-blocking glitch I encountered was actually my own inability to solve a puzzle. This stupid sequence with lasers and a coolant tank sent me to the ironic hell of the point-and-click adventure: I had done everything right and exhausted all my options, but the last piece of the puzzle faltered. My character would bark an “I can’t do that now” whenever I tried to shoot the thing as required. I assumed I was missing some doodad or boobah to complete the puzzle and the LucasArts gods weren’t happy with me but after clicking on everything in the room five times I reloaded a save and found it was just bugged .
Style Points
Sunday Gold’s expressive, impressionistic character design and 1970s ‘conversation pit future’ are what really attracted me to it at first. The style is somewhat wasted on the game’s first two acts, the office building and a catalog-direct Umbrella corp secret lab, but your home base in the dive bar and the latest act’s new Knives Out mansion make better use of the setting . I think there was still a lot of juice in that orange.
Sunday Gold’s writing averages are almost perfectly neutral for me. There are some great bits to the game, like the horribly over-the-top evil corporate motivational posters scattered throughout the office chapter, and building the world is cheeky and fun. The game is set in an extravagantly brutal future in London, obsessed with zombie dog racing and owned by a ‘visionary’ billionaire who looks like a Hollywood producer from the 1970s. However, the dialogue is perfectly room temperature. The smug con man Frank, activist powerhouse Sally and uptight anarchist hacker Gavin are fantastic in profile, compelling archetypes with memorable visual design, but they communicate in either silly jokes or straight-up information dumps. The cool visual style can only carry so much.
Storytelling aside, Sunday Gold is a successful proof-of-concept, effectively fusing two genres together to make something new and, in some ways, better. It doesn’t have the emotional or philosophical weight of a Citizen Sleeper or a Disco Elysium, but it has what really counts: tactical, menu-based combat.
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