Sunderfolk

Every couch co-op game of the last twenty years has been quietly strangled by the same constraint: controllers. You need four of them. They need to be charged. They need to be paired. And once everyone’s holding one, the game has to squeeze four inventories, four ability bars, and four sets of stats onto one television without turning the screen into a spreadsheet. Most designers solve this by simplifying until the tactics evaporate. Secret Door — one of the two studios under Dreamhaven, the publisher assembled from Blizzard’s diaspora — took the opposite route. It removed the controller entirely.

Sunderfolk, released April 23, 2025, is a turn-based tactical co-op RPG that runs on your PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, or Nintendo Switch and is played on your phone. The free Sunderfolk Controller app on iOS and Android is not a gamepad emulator or a second-screen gimmick. It is your hand of cards, your character sheet, your inventory, and your rulebook. The TV shows the hex grid and the fiction. The phone holds the crunch. Three friends join the host by scanning a QR code, and — this is the part that should make other publishers uncomfortable — only the host needs to own the game.

That positioning is deliberate and it is smart. Sunderfolk isn’t competing with XCOM or Baldur’s Gate 3 for your solo Tuesday nights. It’s competing with Gloomhaven sitting unplayed on your shelf because setup takes forty minutes and nobody wants to be the one tracking monster initiative. It’s competing with Jackbox, except with a long campaign and a village hub attached. Reception has been strong and specific: a 4.5/5 rating for the companion app on iOS. Critics have called it a benchmark for the genre. That’s close to right — with one large asterisk we’ll get to.

• Phone-as-Controller Architecture: Each player’s device runs the free companion app, which serves as their private card hand, character sheet, inventory, and rules reference. Card play, targeting, and movement all happen via touch; the shared screen stays clean and cinematic. The QR-code join flow is designed to get a new player into the game quickly, with no account, no download friction beyond the app store, and no purchase.
• Hex-Grid Card Tactics: Six classes — Arcanist, Bard, Berserker, Pyromancer, Ranger, Rogue — each with a distinct skill-card deck. Combat is a resource puzzle: you spend cards, argue over turn order, and chain abilities across characters. Pyromancer lights the terrain; Berserker shoves an enemy into it. The combos are the game.
• Arden, the Village Hub: Between missions the party returns to a town they rebuild together — upgrading shops, unlocking gear, sharing meals, and cultivating relationships with the townsfolk. It’s the downtime phase of a tabletop campaign, rendered without the bookkeeping.
• Remote Play Support: The host can stream the session so distant friends play from their own couches, phones in hand, using the same app. Online multiplayer with mouse and keyboard is supported directly.
• Broad Accessibility: Full audio and subtitles in eight languages, Steam Cloud, Remote Play, and Steam Deck Verified status.

The Gameplay Loop

Strip away the hardware novelty and Sunderfolk is a competent, legible tactics game. That word — legible — is doing real work. Turn-based tactics live or die on whether players can read the board and predict outcomes, and the hex grid, the telegraphed enemy intents, and the card-based ability economy all serve clarity over complexity. Each turn you’re choosing which card to spend from a limited hand, where to stand, and how your move sets up the person going next. There’s no fog of rules. There’s just the decision.

What makes it work is the information asymmetry. Because your cards live on your phone, nobody else can see your hand unless you tell them. That single design choice reconstitutes the most valuable dynamic in tabletop gaming: the table talk. Somebody has to say out loud, “I can pull two of them into a cluster if someone can burn them after.” Somebody else has to volunteer. On a shared TV with four gamepads, all that information is already visible, and coordination degrades into four people silently optimizing in parallel. Here, coordination is verbal, social, and occasionally argumentative. That is not a UI decision. That’s a game design decision executed through UI.

The village of Arden closes the loop. Missions generate resources; resources upgrade Arden; upgraded Arden makes missions easier. It’s a well-worn structure, and Sunderfolk doesn’t reinvent it. What it does well is pace it — the hub is short enough to feel like a breather rather than a chore, and the relationship-building with townsfolk gives players a reason to care about a place rather than a stat line.

The Interface

This is one of the strongest second-screen designs in recent memory, built on the graveyard of bad ones. Wii U asymmetry, the PS Vita’s Remote Play era, the whole graveyard of companion apps. Those failed because the second screen was supplementary — a map, a menu, something you could ignore. Here it’s primary. Your phone is where you play. The TV is where you watch. Once you internalize that inversion, the whole thing clicks.

The app’s design is built for responsiveness. Touch targeting is precise by design, and the skeuomorphic card-hand presentation reads instantly to anyone who has held playing cards. Crucially, the rulebook is in the app, contextual and searchable, which quietly eliminates the single biggest barrier to tabletop tactics: the person who has to keep asking what an ability does. Nobody has to be the rules lawyer. The rules lawyer is in everyone’s pocket.

Onboarding is the app’s weakest stretch. The tutorial is thorough on first run and unskippable on subsequent ones, which is fine for a first session and a real obstacle when teaching a fourth friend who has to sit through it again. Requests for a skip option are well founded.

Where It Breaks

Play Sunderfolk alone and you get a mediocre tactics game. This isn’t a nitpick — it’s the central caveat, and it appears in nearly every critical account of the game. Controlling four characters through four phone interfaces by yourself is administratively tedious and thematically pointless. The information asymmetry that makes the multiplayer sing becomes friction when there’s nobody to hide cards from. If you’re buying this to play solo, buy something else.

The story is charming and light. The writing has warmth, the anthropomorphic cast is well realized, and Anjali Bhimani’s narration is the standout production element in the entire package — she carries the campaign’s tone almost single-handedly, doing the work a good game master does at a real table. But the narrative pitches younger than the tactical layer does, and adults hunting for thematic weight will find pleasant rather than profound.

Online sessions are the technical soft spot. Disconnects are a recurring theme in critical accounts, and the rejoin flow is clumsier than it should be for a game whose entire premise is frictionless joining. When a phone drops mid-encounter, getting back in is not the quick experience the QR code promised. For a launch-window co-op title this is forgivable; a year on, it’s the thing most in need of engineering attention. Class balance also draws consistent, if mild, complaints, and the campaign’s length leaves committed groups wanting more.

The art direction is confident and, importantly, built for the room rather than the player. Sunderfolk’s world is storybook-warm — hand-painted textures, saturated but not garish, a cast of animal-folk with strong silhouettes that read clearly at ten feet from a couch. This matters more than it sounds. Because the TV is a shared spectator display, the game has to be readable by four people at varying distances and angles, none of whom are leaning in. Character models are chunky and distinct. Hex tiles have clear elevation and hazard cues. Ability effects are showy enough to communicate “that worked” without obscuring the board underneath.

Camera work does a lot of quiet lifting, swinging into cinematic angles for big hits and pulling back to a clean tactical overhead when it’s time to think. It’s the closest a game has come to simulating a well-run game master’s sense of pacing.

The technical demands are modest by design. The game is Steam Deck Verified, and given that the Deck itself makes a perfectly good “table” for a four-phone session, that’s a more meaningful certification here than usual. The companion app is light — it’s transmitting state, not rendering a game — so the hardware load on phones should be low even on older devices. The main technical risk isn’t rendering at all; it’s network stability in online sessions, which sits squarely on the connectivity layer rather than the engine.

iOS and Android: Be clear on what these apps are. They are controllers only. You cannot buy or play Sunderfolk on your phone — the app is free precisely because it’s a peripheral, not a product. It requires the full game running on a PC or console. The iOS app’s 4.5/5 across 93 ratings reflects a well-built utility, and complaints there are almost entirely about connection handling rather than the interface itself. Touch is the right input for this game: dragging a card onto a hex is more direct than any stick-and-cursor arrangement.

Steam: The host platform of choice. You get mouse-and-keyboard support for online play, Steam Cloud saves, Remote Play for friends who can’t make it in person, and Deck Verified status. Practically speaking, a PC hooked to a living room TV is the ideal configuration — you get the streaming options for remote friends and the couch setup for local ones.

Nintendo Switch and Switch 2: The most philosophically appropriate home for the game, given Nintendo’s decades in the “get four people in a room” business. The Switch’s dock-and-play model matches Sunderfolk‘s social ambitions exactly. Expect the visual concessions you’d expect on original Switch hardware; the readability-first art direction survives the downgrade better than a realistic style would.

The notable thing across all of these: platform barely matters to the players. Three of your four participants are looking at their own phones regardless of what’s running the session. That’s an unusually elegant answer to cross-platform co-op — the hardware everyone already owns is the compatibility layer.

Sunderfolk is a rare game where the technical premise and the emotional goal are the same thing. Secret Door didn’t build a phone controller because it was clever; they built it because a shared screen plus private hands is how a table works, and that’s what they were actually trying to recreate. The tactics are good. The village is warm. The narration is excellent. But the reason the game works is structural: it removed every piece of friction between “I have three friends over” and “we are playing a tactical RPG together.”

The generosity of the buy-one-play-four model deserves specific credit in a market that has spent a decade finding new things to charge for. A single purchase entertains four people for a full campaign. Measured against a physical board game that entertains the same four for the same duration and requires someone to read a rulebook first, the value case is strong.

What holds it back from a higher rating is real and worth stating plainly. The online layer isn’t as reliable as the premise demands. The story doesn’t reach as high as the systems do. And the game has a hard dependency — other humans — that no patch can address. If you can meet that dependency, this is an easy recommendation. If you can’t, it isn’t for you, and no amount of design cleverness changes that.

The most interesting thing about Sunderfolk isn’t what it is. It’s what it proves: that the biggest untapped peripheral in the living room has been in everyone’s pocket for fifteen years, and it took a studio full of ex-Blizzard veterans to build something worth putting on it. Other developers should be paying close attention.