Sunderfolk is a fresh take on turn-based tactical RPGs that draws heavy inspiration from tabletop gaming, streamlining many of the medium’s concepts digitally to make them more accessible. It comes from publisher Dreamhaven - a company created by Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime - and its in-house studio Secret Door, which boasts a staff of former developers from companies like Riot and Blizzard. Taking place in an entirely-underground fantasy world, the game will take players on a journey across the Sunderland through over 30 missions as they work to keep the village of Arden and its magical Brightstone safe from harm.

The title is designed with couch co-op in mind, utilizing mobile phones as a controller, and aims to foster the same social experience created by games like Dungeons & Dragons. In order to make the game better capture the feeling of having a GM, actress Anjali Bhimani, known for roles in games like Apex Legends, voices every character in different styles, as well as serving as the narrator. Players will be able to choose one of six classes: Ranger, Bard, Arcanist, Berserker, Pyromancer, and Rogue, each of which comes with a unique set of abilities.

Screen Rant interviewed game director Erin Marek, technical director Alan Dabiri, studio head Chris Sigaty, and campaign designer Kara Centell-Dunk across two sessions to discuss how the game has evolved since its inception, translating tabletop concepts to the screen, and the elements of Sunderfolk they’re most excited for players to see.

The Evolution Of Sunderfolk

The Game’s Origins, Biggest Changes, & How Anjali Bhimani ed The Cast

Screen Rant: Can you talk a little bit about the biggest lessons you brought from the experiences that you've had working on past projects into Sunderfolk?

Alan Dabiri: I think there's both professional experience and then there's personal playing game experience. We've already talked a lot about how this game is kind of like us taking our personal game playing experience of getting together for game nights and trying to recreate that in something that can be more accessible.

In of professional experience, the funny thing is some of my past experience has been taking games that are a little bit well established in the genre and then making them kind of better, but using the influence. I'll say one thing that we didn't have with this game was actually being able to lean too much on existing games, because some of the aspects in our game, there's just nothing like it.

There's things where we'd have to try it, we're like, "Is this going to work? I don't know, let's just try it out." In those cases we would pull from some experiences, like we knew when we made StarCraft or whatever, when you're dealing with certain kinds of interactions this works or that doesn't work. We might lean on that to start with, but a lot of it was trial and error because we didn't have as much of the influence that we could like: "Yeah, there's this other game that works exactly the same". I'd say it's a mix of both things, where we could lean on some influences, but in other areas we just had nothing.

Erin Marek: For me, I previously worked at Riot on Wild Rift, and the thing about Wild Rift is it is a player-versus-player experience, but it's also players collaborating together against players together. The collaborative element of their game design was something that I think was pretty inspirational when we were thinking about the kits for the characters.

How can we build in enough synergy between each character that it feels like, "By myself, I can do cool things, but together we can do even cooler things"? Just seeing how that was built in that game I think was inspirational in how we considered the character kits here.

I'd love to hear a little bit more about how Anjali Bhimani came onto this project, and if the vision you had for what her role was going to be evolved at all since she first did.

Chris Sigaty: She actually came on the project just this year. We were working with a couple of writers from Critical Role that we're contracting with just as individuals on the game coming in and helping overall, story-wise. They knew Anjali very well, and they were like, "You have to talk to Anjali. She's amazing." I reached out to Anjali only a couple of months ago, and it was pretty crazy, because I've reached out to various people - like Kara, like Erin, - where I've reached out through things like LinkedIn and they're like, "Who are you?" In this case with Anjali, Spenser [Starke], one of the writers that was working with us, gave me her information, but she had no idea who I was.

She was gracious and she connected with me and then I ran her through what we're trying to do with the game and she was like, "Oh my gosh, I love this. I totally would love to be involved in it," and she accepted after we did that. She is in the tabletop community very deeply, and she loves the space, and she loves to widen experiences for people, so it really resonated with her. We're just excited that she wanted to be a part of it and think she's doing a great job of being that overarching game master. More to come - we just finished principal recording Friday.

Literally this past Friday she was in the studio. There's things we're still discovering, and we'll have at least one or two pickup days as well. It was awesome, she got to play for the first time Saturday and she was like, "Oh, I want to change this, I want to make this character's voice this way now that I see it in context of the game, I want to do it this way."

You mentioned earlier how this game has been in development since 2021-ish. I'm curious to hear from both of your perspectives the biggest iterations that it's gone through in that time since the idea first started.

Chris Sigaty: To be fair and fully accurate, we decided that we were going to make this game that we referred to internally as TV DnD since 2020. TV DnD was really Jackbox meets tabletop gaming; it wasn't really Dungeons & Dragons specifically. We made the decision that year that it was going to be more tactical RPG.

What that meant exactly was a lot of experimentation. If I was to show you some of the experimental stuff from the very end of that year, you would shake your head in disbelief about how it looks nothing like this. It was a big decision about the controller being there, what we called the personal screen, and having hidden information that only the player could see of their character and what was going on there, and how enabling that was to these sorts of experiences. If you've played a couch co-op RPG, it can be frustrating at times because the screen has to be taken over by an individual and you're waiting your turn. This, we could actually have people going to shops independently and doing all this stuff.

So it goes back to 2020, but over time, there's two major things that I can think of. The first was actually the arrival of our lead UI UX designer. At the time, we were duplicating what was on the main screen onto your mobile device, so you would see just like you do today, an almost top-down view of a board. But then you had a straight top-down view here on the personal device, and you had to go and look there and say, "Oh, I'm going to move two, I think that's southwest?" It was this constant look up and look down thing.

The big shake-up was she said, "What if we tried this other thing, which is more like a pointer?" I think it's been a game changer for us. We really changed it and didn't look back, but it was significant. Now the goal is, after you play it enough, that you can just not even look at your phone when you're taking your turn, and just kind of guide up here and all eyes can stay there for the most part. There's subtle things - you want to use a Trinket, you're going to look down - but you can generally go through, confirm a move, even skip an action once you get muscle memory for it.

The other big deal was Erin Merrick, our game director, she took over the reigns in '22, and so that shifted the vision to her vision. Things shifted in the narrative, but more so just overall what we were trying to do, and she brought it together in a really amazing way.

Kara Centell-Dunk: My focus is so mechanical; I always think about the big leaps and jumps in our game design. When town got more existent - you guys unlocked the tavern and the fortune teller today, but there was a time when it was kind of just levels. It was like, "Yeah, we're going to do something with town eventually," so the town being designed and put in. I think once we discovered the breadth of what we wanted to do with levels or missions, I think that was a pretty big leap.

You said there were some features of the game that had to be changed a lot. I'm curious if there were elements where either you tried to implement them and it became, "Whoa, no, that won't work," for whatever unbalanced reason, or things that really had to go through a lot of evolutions in the process?

Erin Marek: Our controls.

Alan Dabiri: That's a great one. The way that you interact by moving or targeting right now, it's nothing on the screen essentially, and you're essentially moving almost like a cursor or track pad cursor on the screen. Previously, we didn't have that at all. We basically reproduced the game world on your phone, and so you saw the hexes, you actually saw the monsters and you saw yourself and you were literally moving one by one essentially around that game world.

I guess that's two things actually - one of them is the fact that the game world appeared on the screen, the other one is the fact that you would move one by one. We kind of blew that whole thing up. Showing the game world on the screen created this really weird thing where a lot of people were playing like [craning neck down] this.

You're playing down, and one of the things we're trying to get here is this whole social experience, and so we want to get you out of your phone as much as possible at least while you're in the missions themselves. Changing to that view where it no longer shows the game world, it's purely just a control surface that lets you move around, now everyone can be looking up [gesturing to television] here and we can all be talking together as opposed to we're looking at our screens.

Then we also made that change where originally you would move step by step and now you can basically draw a line out. Those in concert together, it just feels natural. At the beginning, whenever we have someone play, there's always that moment where they're like, "Okay, this is a little weird. I've never really experienced something like that before," but very shortly thereafter, you just get it and you just feel that movement. I think that was one of the bigger changes.

Erin Marek: That was one of the ones that went through a lot of it. I think even now we're still trying to improve it. The biggest thing is there's not really a lot of other games we can look at for that aspect. There's not another game I could point to and be like, "Look, they do a phone as a controller where you're moving around and it's RPG and very complicated." We looked at a lot of things like the Wii U with the Gamepad and seeing what they did, or even the DS with the screen [gesturing] here and the screen here. There's some things we could kind of reference, but nothing that was quite like it. That went through the most iteration for sure, our movement control scheme.

You talked some about taking a lot of inspiration from tabletop games and not having a lot of video games to really go off of, but in of media outside of games, where did you find yourself taking inspiration?

Erin Marek: Board game wise, Gloomhaven [and] Frosthaven was a really huge motivator for us, a big thing that we kind of pulled from. Those games are really high on the complexity scale, and so we were trying to find something that was almost an access point into those kinds of games.

For the animals, there's things like Redwall, there's a board game called Dale. They do anthropomorphic animals I think really well because they look like animals still is a good way to put it. There's some inspiration on the board game side, a little bit on the non-board game.

Alan Dabiri: From the game side, there's a lot of games in this space, these turn-based, tactical, dungeon-crawley-type either board games or video games; there's a decent amount there for us to look at and be influenced by. I think when the story itself, the narration, I don't know that there was a major influence there.

Originally there was this idea we wanted it to be fantasy. We thought that fantasy connected with a lot of players, but we wanted to do our own twist on it. That's where, number one, you've got this underground setting, which also allows for some unique things.

Once you combine that with the concepts of the tree and the Brightstone itself, there's a lot of cool narrative elements that we can go on. Erin mentioned the animals themselves, that brings another twist into it and can add personality to the characters, but then also make it understandable as well.

You mentioned a big issue being not wanting people to be so locked into their phones and really embracing the social side of the gaming aspect of Sunderfolk. Can you talk a little bit more about the different ways that you tried to cultivate that sort of gameplay style?

Alan Dabiri: I think you have two different aspects of it. When you're in the actual missions themselves, just the synergy between the classes, they're so unique and they each offer different abilities that oftentimes on their own are powerful, but combined with other players is just that much more powerful. Right away you've got this thing where you want to be interacting with your friends like, "Okay, what should we do? Should we go here? Should we do this first?"

That even ties into some decisions we made on the design side in of how you take your turn. There's a lot of games in this space where they might have some kind of initiative mechanic that determines who gets to go first. In this case, anyone can go, but that's another one of these interaction points where: "We should talk about that. Let's figure it out if I go first and you do that," and so there's another social engagement point there as well.

There's then a bunch of other more fun, lighthearted things in of the way you can name things, where when you name things and everyone else sees them, that you've got this experience amongst your friends. Then, obviously, going into town, it's a whole other area where there's a lot of collaboration and social engagement where you have to work together to decide - I don't know how far you guys got, you may not have upgraded any buildings yet, but you work together to collect the right resources that allows you to upgrade certain buildings.

Erin Marek: There's even other things that maybe don't come off immediately as social. The MVP system at the end gives you a chance to talk to each other about like, "Oh, what the heck? You got MVP for this?" Even in the very opening, the GM says multiple times, "Hey, you'll have to work together," to just remind players like, "Hey, you're going to be collaborating."

Gold not being shared I think is a big one that people at first are like, "What the heck?" But in that moment, it creates this social opportunity for us to almost troll each other in a way, but then when you get to town, you don't have to feel bad about it. You can share and contribute using the post office, you can send little messages to each other. It was constantly pointing back at this idea of: the game's hopefully really fun for everybody, but really about connecting with the people next to you on that couch.

Alan Dabiri: I actually thought of one last thing as well, which is the prompts that you get or the interactions you have in town. There's prompts that you might get within a mission that are oftentimes only sent to one person. That's another thing where oftentimes they're nothing critical that if you didn't share it, it's not like your team would lose, but there is some flavor of something there where you have that opportunity to decide to turn to your friends and tell them about, "Hey, by the way, it says you're making some noise and the other ogres are hearing it and that they're going to show up soon."

The same thing happens in town where you can talk to the different NPCs, and those are really just for you because you're the only one seeing them. Obviously someone else can go and talk to the same person, but oftentimes there's stuff that progresses the story there as well, adds some flavor to it, so again, you can share that or not share.

Making Progress In Sunderfolk

How The Game's Classes & Village Can Vary & Grow

I understand a lot of your inspirations behind the classes themselves, but the card sets and all of those mechanics, can you talk a little bit about the overall number of cards players will be getting and how you worked out how those should be diversified within each character?

Erin Marek: We went with cards because it's very reminiscent of board games. You're used to having lots of decks that you shuffle. But the other thing is cards are very tactile, and there's this element of playing it from my hand to the board that we try to replicate with sliding up or throwing the cards. They're also very easy to customize. They keep a nice clean format for people to be able to understand things, so it's a little bit of why we went with cards over something else.

Then for a hero character, outside the Arcanist, you'll get nine skill cards total. You start with three at the end of the tutorial and you'll get six more across the level ups. We wanted to make sure players had enough variety that they could actually spec differently. You could play a two-player game where actually you're Pyro and you're Arcanist and you have no tank in your party. We wanted to make sure there was stuff in your build flow that could be like, "Well, I might not necessarily be a tank, but I have this card that really lets me be able to take damage, or, "As the Arcanist, I can create decoys and put them in spots so that they'll target those instead of me."

A lot of the cards are about the core mechanic; how do we play around the characters ive and really showcase that? How do we provide a couple of cards that are a little different than what you would expect, so that depending on your player composition, you can pick and choose and synergize together in that way?

Was there one class, either because of their move set or just nailing down what you wanted them to be, that was more difficult than the others?

Erin Marek: Yes, there were problem children for sure. [Laughs] I think all of them in their way have had their own challenges; I think the one I'll talk about though is actually less gameplay focused. We actually had a previous Ranger model, it didn't look like this to start, and we just realized it really wasn't hitting the archetype vibe.

Also, we tried really hard to make the characters fairly gender ambiguous so that you could kind of project your own gender onto the character, and it was leaning very masculine, so we actually completely redid the model and the art for the Ranger. I know the art team was very excited about the opportunity to get it up to where it's at now, and I think we're all really pleased with where it landed.

Gameplay-wise, the Arcanist has been so challenging, because it does have this extra Mana level, and so making sure everything feels balanced in that has been the biggest challenge. It also has more complex cards than other characters because it is a slightly more complex class, so that one's been a little bit of a problem child just in that regard. I think the Berserker has been the opposite, because it's a little bit simpler. It's been challenging in still making it feel compelling for people and making sure it's not so simple that you don't see the synergies and the complexities in it.

As the game progresses and you start getting farther and farther into the story, how much variance are players going to be seeing in of things like maps and enemies?

Erin Marek: As you progress through the story, you'll unlock new biomes, new terrain effects, new monsters. The hope is that we're always incorporating something fresh or new as you progress forward, but kind of do the throwback to some of those previous things that you see so that you're like, "Okay, I'm familiar with this piece, but this is the new thing here in this encounter."

We've tried to really diversify the kinds of objectives that you have so it's not always just like, "Hey, kill all the monsters." It's like, "Hey, do this thing, do this attack, make this thing happen." You guys saw it with a couple of the missions, like, "Hey, collect the supplies, rescue the beetle, get the allies out of your safely." I think that there's quite a bit of variability even into Act Three, you're unlocking brand new biomes with new stuff, new mechanics. The hope is there's always something new and fresh that you're playing and you're never getting stale.

Alan Dabiri: As you go through the game, you're going to be seeing a lot of different cool parts of the Sunderland.

In of the town and how it progresses over the course of the campaign, like you said, we got to see a tiny fraction of that, but I'd love to hear more about how both the buildings and building relationships with characters really helps players progress and changes over the course of the game.

Kara Centell-Dunk: I'm not the direct designer of either of those systems, so I'm going to speak to them to the best of my knowledge. One of the cool things about building relationships with NPCs is that it is mechanically beneficial - they give you things. [Laughs] Put attention in, get mechanically relevant objects out. But different NPCs will have different relationships to you.

There are NPCs that are your family, there are NPCs that are just the people you meet around town, there's NPCs that I believe you can romance, so you can experience the story through the lens of people living in the town that you're trying to protect, which I think is fun. Then you get things like gold or you get things like Trinkets or you get equipment out of them sometimes as well, so there's the story stuff for the story players and there's the material goods for the material good players.

Chris Sigaty: That leads to the town itself. There's a bunch of different buildings that you don't have access to initially. Over time you're exposed to these choices that you'll make on what you want to get; it's usually three or four things that you can pick one of in between missions. First it's unlocking those buildings, but then over time there's different levels of those buildings as well, so you'll be hard-pressed to decide what you want to do based on what your group's agenda is and what they're looking to accomplish, which I think is part of the fun. It's a shared group dynamic just like, "Who's going to go first in this combat?" It's like, "Which one of these would be most beneficial?"

You asked what changed the most - that came online later, as Kara said. Originally, it was all spread out and you could do anything anytime you wanted, but it was also super complicated to keep in your head and visit all the spots. Now we've done a little bit of simplification there, which I think is interesting in a good way for player discussion. You can all see the choices that you have right then and can really debate and talk about what's up and make a decision together, similar to picking what mission you're going to go on.

That's a big part of it, and it does benefit all sorts of things. One of the most powerful, I believe, is the temple upgrade, it gives you a plus one movement at the beginning of any mission. That doesn't sound like a lot - it's huge having a haste as soon as the mission starts, you can get that much further in, grab a monster, throw it behind you or whatever you want to do. It's things like that. It can be mechanically applying to a level, or you have things like at the post office; if you upgrade the post office, the first person who gets back and sends something to somebody else gets bonus gold.

Kara Centell-Dunk: I was going to open with a sentence never before said in the English language, which is: I'm an unrepentant post office tier two girly. [Laughs] I'm like, "We need to get that post office to tier two right now. I want 25 gold every mission." Then the way I play, at least with my local friends, is it's a competition to see who can get there first to send a pittance of gold to someone so that you can get 25.

What The Future Holds For Sunderfolk

DLC Potential, Replayability, & Anticipating Fan Reactions

Speaking of future plans, I feel like I heard the word "DLC" earlier - are there already plans for that in the works at all?

Alan Dabiri: Right now we're just focused on Sunderfolk itself. I'm sure there will easily be opportunities for us since it's a campaign based game, there's all these different things that we could add. It's something we definitely want to look into, but this game is the main focus right now.

Erin Marek: Yeah, I think we can imagine a world where we could release more heroes or more things that would get people inspired, but Alan's right, keep our head on the prize, get the game out the door first.

Are there any smaller details that aren't necessarily grand-scale things that a lot of players will notice, but are things that players who are really into that minutiae or into the genre that you think they'll appreciate when they discover it in this game?

Kara Centell-Dunk: I want to talk about monster abilities, because I think when you're very new to the game or you're playing more relaxed, you don't spend as much time caring about the monster. How much can they walk? What's their range, what are their ives? Because monsters have ive abilities like heroes do. I think players who are fans of those strategy genres and of similar tabletop games will experience the unique mechanical identities of monsters more fully.

They'll see more about, "Oh, this ive ties into their unique Fate Card that ties into their spell." There's overarching faction identity; a lot of our ogres, their ives are more about teamwork. When something gets attacked, they buff each other. Then when we move on to other factions, they'll also have similarities kind of on a broad scale that you only kind of see once you've played through and become familiar with the game.

Chris Sigaty: I think there's a bunch of little things. One of the challenges that's happened with doing narrative in this style is that you have a mixture of people that have different wants and needs. Some people are just like, "Skip the story, come on, we got to get to the thing," other people really want to lean into the narrative. Town becomes this very interesting moment for that where you can go and just focus on the mechanics if you want to do that, but there are people who really want to understand what's happening with the townsfolk and what's going on.

There's a lot of little nuances in there, and a lot of this stuff is more recently written, and we're still iterating on it right now. But my hope is, and there is some of this as I've been playing through the most recent round of stuff we've put in, where you get to learn tidbits about this world that you wouldn't necessarily pick up if you're not talking to these folks. Have the ogres attacked Arden before? When? These details that I think will be fun for those people who want to lean into the narrative side of it, that's a piece of it.

There's lots of little things - artists always blow me away with little details about, "Oh, that's not leather, that's mushroom, because there's not access to leather and they're animals themselves." There's these bits of attention to detail that I think are little things that, if you really pay attention, the artists are always coming up with clever ways to try and add some of this game's world values into it.

Historically, from all the games that I've worked on, it's always how players act differently than what we expect - that's really been the exciting part. - Alan Dabiri

Besides the obvious variation that comes with picking different party , how would you say the game differentiates itself the most between playthroughs so that it has that aspect of replayability?

Chris Sigaty: To be fair, our goal wasn't to have massive replayability with our first game, it was to have some replayability. What we found to be the biggest, most compelling aspect for people out of our friends and family was, "I can't wait to try this other character." People wanting to try these other mechanics on a different character as a driver, the replayability of the campaign is a nice addition, because it does allow you to play through another time and say, "Oh, I haven't seen this one. Let me try this."

It is 38 missions, you'll play 31 of those missions on your way through the campaign, so you have seven additional missions that you can get in your play through, which I think is nice. The other part is all the choices you're making. You can go after different equipment, go after different things to outfit the sort of build you're after on the way through. If you went with a very fire-heavy build on the Pyro, which probably makes sense most of the time, but you decide you want to go push heavy build, you could do that too.

Those things combined lead to replayability, and the maybe ideal outcome is you play with your group, then you decide, "You know what? My gaming group had a lot of fun with this. I should bring this back to my family and we should play together too," and that you would have a great time playing it two, three, four times through with no problem. We've played a lot more than that; we're still having a good time playing it, but it's not as endless. We purposely didn't make it endless replayability to start.

There are some cool things that Kara was working on that won't make it for the launching game that we think will be there as early content where it has more randomization. You could, in an evening, play through the equivalent of a scenario where you play two or three missions that are not as story related, but they randomize things and do things a little differently, but that would be something in DLC in the future.

Kara Centell-Dunk: I'd add two things, one of which is each character gradually unlocks a lot more cards, so even when you're replaying the same character class, you can specialize a little bit differently in things. One of my favorite things specifically is the Bard character - if I'm playing with a Berserker or a Rogue, I'm like, "I'll do heals, I'll do range." I also have a build that I play with the Bard that I refer to as my off-tank build [Laughs] because I'm like, "Oh, I'm a cute little bat, hearts, hearts, hearts. You can do as much damage to me as you want because I'm just going to pick up hearts right afterwards." I can play the Bard ranged, I can play the Bard as a front liner.

Not everything is quite that distinct. The other character I play a lot is the Arcanist, and the Arcanist has a build that is really centered around the creation and utilization of decoys, which is the Arcanist can essentially put out a decoy that monsters will prefer to attack if they can. Then I can unlock the cards that let me spawn decoys or explode decoys and do damage to things adjacent to them, or I can unlock a card that's for every decoy I've destroyed during an encounter, I do higher damage. I can do like, "Oh, today I'm going to play a decoy build of the Arcanist, and then next time I might play a different build."

I find in playthroughs, depending on what my party is, depends on what builds I lean into. Oftentimes, when I play with other groups, the synergies are different, and so I build a character differently that's maybe a little bit more fine-tuned that everyone will enjoy, but I enjoy that.

I'll mention Shadowstone difficulty, which is once you've completed the game all the way through once, you unlock a difficulty called Shadowstone. We have Elite monsters in the game that are tougher, more unique ability versions of regular monsters, and Shadowstone difficulty makes every monster an Elite; when you go in and fight, your puzzles become harder because the monsters are doing more.

Without giving too much away about what players can expect from the game, is there any particular biome or character or mission that you are especially excited to see players react to once the game is out and they start playing it?

Chris Sigaty: Off the top of my head, I can't wait for players to get to the boss fights. I think the boss fights are where it really takes off. It's just such a mind-melting moment in a good way that you have to think about everything differently. The other thing we didn't talk about were weapons. I don't think we talked about them much, but they come online later in the game, and they also just change the strategy. Things are proccing for your weapons - basically you want your teammates to do specific things, and then you suddenly can use a weapon off turn.

Then the big stuff that's really gotten people literally shouting with glee that you didn't see today are ultimates come online eventually for characters. The ultimates are really powerful, but you have to talk about it as a group about who's going to use what when, because they only proc every other turn and then only one of you can use it.

Kara Centell-Dunk: Hands down the boss fight. To be fair, your question asked me, "What is your favorite thing of the things you make?" [Laughs] Those are all the stuff I make, the missions, the enemies, the monsters and things. I'm so proud of how the boss system turned out. I think it creates such a good new threat and it changes the challenge that players are facing without changing the game fundamentally. It builds on what players already know in interesting ways.

There's also little things, just encounters and monsters. I'm particularly excited about - there's at least one monster that when it dies, it explodes, and so you have to care about where you kill it. You have to be like, "Okay, if I kill it, it's going to explode and hurt me." But when you push it, it takes damage, and so when you can shove it at things and try to get it to explode on other things, and there's just a very simple joy in: "I'm going to get rid of this enemy and it's going to hurt that enemy."

Erin Marek: You add this little blue button shroom companion in Act Two, and it is to die for - literally, I'll die for this little guy. [Laughs] Anjali's voice for it is so wholesome and endearing. I'm very excited for them to see the blue button shroom, which you also get to name, so you get to name your little companion guy; that I'm really the most excited for.

Alan Dabiri: For me, it's actually coming up with things that we didn't plan. We've played the game a lot, obviously, and there's certain ways that are like, "You just do this, and you do that, and you get through it," and then every now and then we'll sit down with a group like you, and someone will do something completely different and it works out, or it works out even better.

I think this game, especially with the combination between all the different heroes, there's these unique kinds of combinations you can come up with, so I think there's a lot of opportunity for players to bring their own ideas into play as well. Just historically, from all the games that I've worked on, it's always how players act differently than what we expect - that's really been the exciting part.

Sunderfolk will release for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and Steam some time in 2025.

Source: playsunderfolk/YouTube