Like Guy Ritchie's Snatch, Sunday Gold is criminally underrated for MANY reasons. Outside of its gritty and gruesome portrayals of a dystopian London, it executes a well-blended mix of RPG and point-and-click adventures. The great voice acting, sleek comic-book aesthetic, and grungy music offer players a neat and unique package that's not only worth a try, but worth completing. I can understand that some may not be down for point-and-click gameplay, but please--give it a shot. You won't regret it.
If you’re looking for a good movie to watch on Black Friday while you recover during the holiday halftime that exists between Thanksgiving and Christmas, look no further than Snatch. Guy Ritchie is known for many movies, but rarely do I see folks praise his directing and screenwriting of this 2001 classic about a diamond heist gone horribly, horribly wrong. When I first saw this film in 2009 while I was procrastinating on a high-school book report, I fell in love with Jason Statham’s Turkish, Dennis Farina’s Cousin Avi, and Alan Ford’s Brick Top for exaggerating stereotypes often abused in heist- and mob-films. This celebration and satirization of the criminal underworld was refreshing yet silly, and I couldn’t help but feel that Sunday Gold hooked me just like Snatch did when I first watched it way back when.
I mentioned Snatch at the start of this review of a video game because of its uncanny, and perhaps unintentional, similarities with Sunday Gold. Right from the jump, I’m presented with foul-mouthed-Londoners, Frank and Sally, who are undergoing a perpetual string of bad luck until they are presented with an opportunity from a disgraced computer whiz, Gavin, to steal secrets from a sinister megacorp. I couldn’t help but appreciate these subtle connections on top of the cel-shaded futurism meets pop-art present in the game. Hell, I appreciated quite a lot about this game, and hopefully this review should help you understand why.
Sunday Gold presents itself as a point-and-click-turn-based-RPG (what a mouthful!), but without leaning too heavily into gameplay elements and loops that can push players of each respective genre away. From the point-and-click side of things, you’re tasked with navigating Frank, Sally, and Gavin around different rooms, interacting with objects, and solving puzzles. While navigating, you may end up in a turn-based battle that looks similar to any recent RPG. Completing a battle earns you XP toward leveling up, and when you level up, you can unlock additional perks and abilities for your trio.
To offset mindless navigation and completing content in a short order, Sunday Gold implements two gameplay levers that force players to make thoughtful decisions on what and how to explore. The AP (action point) system is the first of these measures, and RPG-vets may see this as a nuanced mana resource system. When navigating through each room, AP can be spent on interacting with specific-elements and participating in mini-games tied to each character (more on that later). Each character has a max of 7 AP (that can be modified with consumables), and once you’re out, you end your turn. Your AP gets fully replenished when you end your turn, thankfully, so you don’t have to worry about being entirely restricted by what you can and cannot do. I like this system a lot, frankly, as it forced me to pace myself and make decisions on what to interact with first, as well as who I should be sending to investigate certain areas.
The gameplay loop with the AP system works really well, and I mean REALLY well, for the weird combination of a point-and-click adventure meets RPG. Each area is visually distinct and lacks half-baked repetitive content. I’m not the biggest fan of point and clickers, but Sunday Gold manages to execute the pointing and clicking well beyond simply solving puzzles. Some of the objects you can interact with offer lore-specific context or some characters’ thought processes. In other situations, spending all of your AP and concluding the turn with a battle offers predictability in knowing what is to come as well as a mental break between solving puzzles. Characters move instantly, too, meaning that you’re not forced to wait for a character to shuffle across the room to look at a painting or a window.
The other gameplay lever that forced me to make careful decisions was the Compusure system, and you’re introduced to the positives and negatives of effectively managing each of your characters’ composure. For instance, if your characters’ composure drops under 80%, their in-battle abilities will be less effective (or even harmful to your team!). If it drops further, well…be prepared to think fast! I love and hate the composure system, if I could be brutally honest. On one hand, it’s another RPG resource/vital to manage alongside everything else I’m managing. On the other, I appreciate having the ability to wager my composure in exchange for additional AP. When one of my characters was low on AP, I simply used a consumable drug, and that let me make one or two more moves before I was forced to end my turn. It feels like managing the Brave and Default actions from the Bravely series, but with more visible negatives if you’re not mindful of each character’s vitals.
At the end of each turn, there’s a chance (with some exceptions) that you’ll participate in a random encounter with an enemy. While the turn-based battles themselves are not as complex-yet-convoluted as The Ruined King, they’re nowhere as simple as you may expect from a Final Fantasy or Pokemon title. While in battles, AP is used when you attack and cast abilities. Once you’re out, you can set your character to guard for a turn, and the next time they can act they’ll be rewarded with some AP! These battles weren’t too difficult for the most part, but they were in no way structured that let me phone it in and just click ATTACK over and over again. And, even more, you’re in NO WAY expected to grind through battles in order to progress. If anything, the game is too forgiving compared to other hardcore RPGs.
Yes, the difficulty of this game is that of an easier RPG. I spent the majority of Sunday Gold winning battles pretty easily. When I did end up losing, though, I had made pretty big mistakes with managing my characters’ HP and rarely using consumables. This ease could possibly be explained by me exploiting my enemies’ weakness, or perhaps my prior experience in playing RPGs and attempting to min-max when I needn’t have, or maybe because the game is meant to be less of an RPG-battle-grind and more of an intermission between storytelling. Sunday Gold is a point-and-click adventure with RPG elements, after all.
I must commend BKOM Studios for doing such a great job with character designs, as Frank, Sally, and Gavin are fully realized with nuanced backstories. Frank Barber is a gritty loner down on his luck after several failed heists. Sally Wheeler is Frank’s partner with a heart of gold who ends up proving that the future is feminine, fatal, and furious. Gavin Dorsey’s edginess and unpredictability earns your trust but teaches you that there’s so much more than meets the eye. In cutscenes and in-game, characters’ interactions skew toward being fluid and congenial, almost as through these three folks have known each other for much longer than the game portrays. And, the voice acting is just top notch.
As this game is an RPG, Frank, Sally, and Gavin have unique out-of-battle and in-battle traits, and all of them suit their character archetypes quite well. Gavin’s abilities lean into his technological prowess, utilizing his intelligence and craftiness to take control of robotic enemies and overloading their systems to shut them down. Sally utilizes her brawn, taunting enemies into attacking her and buffing herself to absorb that damage without much as a scratch. She also can heal enemies like a medic, too. Frank leads the ragtag group and can buff his allies’ composure or debuff enemies.
I didn’t expect Sunday Gold to be a deep and balanced RPG like others I’ve reviewed recently, but I was pleasantly surprised with each character’s strengths and weaknesses. The AP system replacing the typical mana system let me freely experiment with abilities to understand how they worked. But, I did notice that Sally was much more powerful than Frank and Gavin in some situations. When she wasn’t healing my party, she would dish out the most pain to enemies in a single turn, whereas Gavin and Frank needed at least two. In the grand scheme of things, this imbalance of Sally’s sheer power is overlooked when it’s still fully possible to win battles without Sally altogether (and there will be situations where Sally won’t be in your party).
Out of battle, each character is able to accomplish unique tasks that align with their character archetypes. Frank’s is lockpicking, involving timing clicks in specific dead zones. Sally’s involves an act of meditation prior to moving large objects. Unlike the former two teammates’ minigames being time-based, Gavin’s minigame is skill based and involves “hacking” through tech by figuring out passwords. I liked Gavin’s hacking minigame the most, as it forced me to utilize logic to figure out numeric sequences. But, if you’re more interested in more complex puzzles, you’ll definitely find some of the puzzles in Sunday Gold to be a piece of cake.
Right from the start, I found Sunday Gold to be audibly appealing. In the Prologue where I was getting to know Frank and Sally, the bar’s music was playing tracks from Burly Wood’s first EP, “Watch it Burn.” Burly Wood’s tracks, alongside the original music created for the game, added a sense of grit and grime to what otherwise is the urban criminal underbelly of London. It just clicks so well. I loved the entire artistic direction of Sunday Gold, too. Again, expect to see cel-shaded futurism mixed with pop-art you could find in a comic book. The cutscenes (that are skippable, for those who aren’t down to watch along) feel like a visual novel. Onomatopoeias (BAM!) fill the screen and emulate the chaos of alerts. During quieter sequences, the animations are subtle and grim. London has never looked or sounded more gritty, and if this is the future we’re hurtling towards, I’m all for it.
Some may be tired of cyber-futurism as it currently exists. In the past few years alone, we’ve seen a myriad of cyberpunk-themed games that give glimpses into a technology-fueled dystopian future such as Ghostrunner, Ghostwire Tokyo, Deus Ex, Detroit: Become Human, The Red Strings Club, Ruiner, FF7‘s remake, with CyberPunk 2077 being top of mind. If you’re one of these folks, you may (just may!) be bored with the corporate-ruled and drug-addled London of the future. But, if you’re like me, you’ll find this reimagined take on the future to be refreshing. Corporations are self-aware of their power (similar to how they’re portrayed in The Outer Worlds, if you’re familiar with that little gem), dog-racing has taken a darker and more gruesome turn.
I’ve spent much of this review discussing how much I’ve enjoyed Sunday Gold, but it’s not without its faults. My first major quibble was that of its inventory management. Each character has their own specific inventory, meaning that you need to transfer items and equipment between your characters on a regular basis. Thankfully, it’s as simple as clicking a tab and navigating the submenus, but it becomes a chore the more I was tasked with doing it. I understand why this was implemented, as it’s needed for characters who are split up, but I do think some efficiency is needed in transferring inventory across characters.
Also, profanity. Personally, I’m fine when games skew profane when times are tough. I lived in New York for a while, and it’s a place where, as Lewis Black said, “fuck isn’t a word, it’s a comma.” However, in Sunday Gold, profanity is treated more as a verb and can be interpreted as included for the sake of being included rather than carrying meaning. Frank, Sally, and Gavin are up to their eyeballs in bloody nonsense, but it begs me to question the role of having the sheer quantity of profanity I heard in-battle, out-of-battle, and throughout the story.
Finally, it’s length. I was able to complete Sunday Gold in naught more than 16 hours, which is not much compared to other RPGs on the market. While some may consider this to be short and sweet, others may be put off by how quick the game progresses and finishes on a sufficient note. Storywise, there’s no cliffhanger ending, but I definitely want more content out of Frank, Sally, and Gavin. I want so much more.
Like Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, Sunday Gold is criminally underrated for MANY reasons. Outside of its gritty and gruesome portrayals of a dystopian London, it executes a well-blended mix of RPG and point-and-click adventures. The great voice acting, sleek comic-book aesthetic, and grungy music offer players a neat and unique package that’s not only worth a try, but worth completing. I can understand that some may not be down for point-and-click gameplay, but please–give it a shot. You won’t regret it.
