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I've had my eye on this game for a while. I loved the art style and the fact that it was about a rag-tag bunch of heisters in a dystopian future akin to Disco Elysium. Upon finishing the game, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Sunday Gold, even with its small slew of problems.
In Sunday Gold, you follow a thief named Frank. He's gotten into some money troubles and needs to pay off some loans quickly. One of his friends, Sally, hooks him up with a job to help make a ton of money. She has found a man named Gavin who wants to sneak into a facility to find some dirt on Kenny Hogan, the head of a huge mega-conglomerate company that has been doing some shifty things. Upon taking on the job, this rag-tag group starts to learn a lot more than they bargained for.
Sunday Gold is a blend of Point-and-Click adventure mixed with turned-based RPG. During the Point-and-Click sections, you will have the group examine and interact with objects on the screen, find items, and solve puzzles. Each one of them excels at different things and sometimes you'll have to use their skills in a mini-game to progress the plot. Frank has the lockpicking mini-game, Sally has to focus her strength on a meter to move heavy things, and Gavin has to do hacking mini-games. What makes this fun is on certain parts of the game, the gang will split up and you'll want to backtrack to certain areas just to make sure you check everything.
The game uses an Action Point (AP) system so doing certain actions will drain their points. You can use items to replenish these points or end your turn in which time will move forward and there is a chance you will get into a random battle. There are even some moves/abilities you can learn to make your skills cost less AP which I found pretty nifty. Let's look into combat.
The Turn-Based RPG combat is very simple and I found it fun. Different weapons and abilities you use have different properties and can greatly damage types of enemies. For example, robot enemies are weak to moves that have "TECH" or blunt damage. (So Gavin usually knocks them out pretty well). BUT, you can find weapons and accessories that change the property of your attacks. So while Frank by default has Slashing damage, you can find a bullet upgrade that turns his shots into Blunt damage. The mix and matching of combat makes it fun. You also have to be mindful of your AP usage in combat as well as different moves that cost more or less AP. Spending too much will make your character lose a turn to get AP back. Luckily, defending refunds a lot of AP and makes you take less damage. I love it when RPGs give you a good reason to actually defend aside from just taking less damage.
Another system I liked was the Composure system. Throughout the game, you'll have to be mindful of the main cast's composure. Story events or enemy abilities will make them lose composure and it affects them in and out of battle. In battle, if their composure gets low, they will start to panic and your turn is suddenly timed. The lower the composure, the less time you have to take your turn before they freak out and just do a random move. Out of combat, the composure affects their mini-games. Frank will be more shaky on lockpicking, it'll be harder for Sally to keep her meter centered for focus, and Gavin will start to forget numbers and symbols in the hacking game. Luckily, there are items and moves you can use to raise their composure again, but I really liked this mechanic from a narrative and gameplay point of view. Another touch I liked is that as their composure gets lower, their character portraits start to look frightened and weird, great artistic touch there.
Now for gripes. For as much as I loved this game, it did have issues. For one, Frank's lockpicking mini-game gave me a ton of issues where I was sure I had the marker centered in the sweet spot but the game said I didn't. Luckily, you can change this in the options to make it easier, but then it makes Sally's mini-game too easy. The turned-based combat is fun, but it's very slow and after a while, you may find yourself getting annoyed by how long some battles take, especially the boss battles where the boss takes multiple turns. A fast forward or 2X speed would have been great to fix that. I've had some music glitches in the game sometimes but nothing game-breaking that a quick restart didn't help. The majority of the puzzles were fun to figure out, but there was a small handful where I just looked up the solution because it wasn't fun trying to figure out how to solve them. And lastly, what most of the other reviews are saying, the ending. It is very rushed and it makes me sad. You can tell that had big plans but either ran out of time or money. There are still lots of unanswered questions and it's sad it ends so abruptly.
Final verdict? Despite the long list of gripes, I absolutely LOVED this game. I loved playing as Frank, Sally, and Gavin. Loved the voice acting and the overall theme of the game. I loved solving the puzzles and hitting the "AH HA!" moment when the answers just clicked. I loved having a good synergy with my characters when I leveled them up. I would love a Sunday Gold 2 with the crew returning and trying to take down another company. I say grab this game when it's on sale if you are on the fence. There are hard bits and it is clunky on some points. But overall, I enjoyed my time with this game and would recommend it to those who want a fun Point-and-Click game with some RPG elements thrown in. Thanks for reading! Cheers Guvna!