SULFUR

My first hour with SULFUR ended with a dead priest, an empty inventory, and a grudging respect for a four-person Swedish studio that clearly knows how to make a dungeon feel genuinely hostile. Strip away the blocky, colorful art style and what you have is a first-person roguelite that quietly fuses dungeon-crawler looting, extraction-shooter tension, and an RPG-lite build system into something that doesn't cleanly map to anything else on Steam. You play as a holy man pursuing a witch through the titular sulfurous realm, dying repeatedly and returning each time slightly wiser, if not noticeably tougher. The narrative is light and drip-fed through quirky NPCs stationed back at your hub settlement, and it does just enough to make you care why you keep descending. The core loop is tighter than it first appears. You start each run with modest gear, a wakizashi for close quarters and whatever firearms you scavenge, then push deeper through five distinct biomes - Caves, Town, Sewers, Dungeon, and Castle - each with their own enemy roster and loot tables. The weapon modification system is where SULFUR earns its depth: accessories slot onto guns to tighten spread or sharpen aim, while oils enchant bullets with elemental or stat effects. Mixing a freshly looted shotgun with the right oil combination can turn a mediocre scav run into a genuinely dominant build, and the cooking mechanic adds another layer by letting you combine found ingredients at cauldrons scattered through levels. The recipes are not handed to you, which is either charming or infuriating depending on your patience for experimentation. Combat itself rewards chokepoint discipline - narrow corridors are your friend, open rooms are where runs die. There are genuine rough edges worth naming. The early hours are deliberately underpowered, and the most creative guns are gated behind enough run time that newcomers may bounced out before seeing them. Enemy AI reads the room well enough to swarm you in open spaces, but can funnel predictably into doorways in ways that reduce firefights to a geometry exercise. Loot generation has a randomness ceiling that occasionally produces runs with no meaningful weapon upgrades across multiple floors, which is a balance concern the community has flagged and the developer is actively iterating on. With roughly 87 percent positive reviews across nearly 9,000 Steam ratings as of mid-2026, the consensus is clearly favorable, but that 13 percent who push back tend to cite exactly these friction points in the opening sessions. For the strategy-minded player who likes optimizing under pressure, SULFUR is a strong proposition even in Early Access. The extraction-shooter DNA means every decision to push deeper carries real cost-benefit weight: the amulet extraction mechanic lets you bail out and bank your loot, or gamble another floor for a potentially game-changing weapon drop. That knife-edge sits well with anyone who thinks in terms of risk-adjusted returns per run. The developer roadmap points toward multiplayer support, more maps, and expanded weapon variety, and the team's track record of iterating on community feedback during the demo phase suggests those promises have structural backing. The free demo still exists if you want to stress-test your tolerance for the early-game difficulty curve before committing.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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