Hunt down goblins, undead, and whatever else stands in your way in Sulfur, a cartoonish dungeon-crawling extraction shooter.

In Sulfur, we play as a gun-wielding priest who seeks revenge after a witch infiltrates his church and burns it to the ground. The priest now travels through a purgatory situated between heaven and hell in search of revenge and a way to save the members of his congregation.

So, how does the game work as both a dungeon-crawler and extraction shooter? Is it too early to get into it? Find out the answer to these questions and more in our full preview for Sulfur.

Sulfur can be best described as a brutal shooter viewed through cartoonish lenses. The game features permanent item loss on death, and deals with some really dark subjects at points, letting you annihilate your foes, cut them up, and then sell their organs to various vendors or use them to cook recipes.

While Sulfur might be a dungeon-crawler at its core, the game pulls a lot from survival extraction shooters like Escape from Tarkov, especially when it comes to the weapon customization system and the way inventory management is handled.

Even if the game isn’t necessarily realistic with its guns, instead opting for crazy modifiers like bullet bounce or elemental damage, it still feels really in-depth, and gives you a good amount of tools to truly make a weapon your own.

Sulfur‘s weapons can be customized by adding parts, oils, and enchantments. Enchantments usually give the weapon some sort of elemental damage, while oils change the weapon’s stats, like damage, critical chance, and recoil, usually featuring positive and negative effects. Parts only seem to have beneficial effects, and can be attached at will to give your weapon sights or a silencer.

The player unlocks different enchantment and oil slots by leveling up their guns, and these can completely change how your weapon will work. Some items even let you change the caliber of a gun or switch its firing method from semi into full auto or vice versa.

The game is not really restrictive with these systems either, letting you freely customize your arsenal as long as you have the free slots to do so. It’s fantastic to clear levels with a weapon you customized to perfection, and it’s absolutely miserable to end up losing it during a run.

The game’s shooting feels pretty smooth, and despite enemies being basically 2D sprites that walk around, they give a good amount of feedback when shot. Most light weapons feel fast and precise, while heavier weapons feel slow and powerful, and there’s even a melee attack that lets you deal with enemies whenever you run out of ammo.

The game is filled with different guns, ranging from straightforward pistols and assault rifles to revolvers that can shoot an entire cylinder at once and battery-powered shotguns. Sulfur does a great job at making every gun feel unique, and all of them have their own niche.

One commendable thing is that guns have fixed stats, so whenever one drops, even if it’s in bad condition, you can simply use your money to repair it and start leveling it up by killing enemies. It would be really easy to give guns randomized stats for the sake of artificially extending playtime, but that is thankfully not the case.

The game’s level design is possibly its most brutal aspect, as you can only move backwards to evade enemies thanks to the tunnel-like environments, which leads to the player often being backed against a wall while trying to deal with hordes of enemies.

Enemies tend to move single-file, and their bodies can block bullets even after they die, making it difficult to maneuver around encounters. The first dungeon definitely suffers a lot more from these issues, which can make things frustrating for beginners.

The game’s levels seem to be built from fixed locations that get arranged at random to build floors, and each dungeon has a room halfway through that charges up your medallion and lets you extract back to the church, meaning that if you clear half a run, you can exit at any point later with your loot.

While Sulfur has a pretty fun gameplay loop and a great gun customization system, it also has a lot of quality-of-life issues and controller problems, which can’t be overlooked.

At the moment, it’s impossible to assign consumables to your quick bars while using a controller, and the game has a really bad habit of moving some of your items into containers at random, which is really dangerous when you consider just how much time and money it takes to level up a gun and customize it to your liking.

Things like repairing your items or inventory management become very tedious tasks to do with a controller, as it feels like the player is actively fighting the game when trying to hover to the correct option in the menu. Basic gameplay works completely fine when using a controller, but anything that involves menus is a nightmare to deal with.

Sulfur also features a very in-depth cooking system, which is basically never explained to the player. A cauldron can be found during the game’s tutorial with a picture of three mushrooms and a stick, which creates a mushroom skewer, and then nothing is taught to the player ever again.

There is an absurd amount of different foods and ingredients that the player can find, but the fact that no recipe aside from the most basic one is taught to the player means that you might simply assume that they haven’t even been implemented yet.

The fact that certain ingredients drop so rarely also makes it impossible to figure out what foods you can create, and even if you trial and error your way into the correct ingredient combination, the game doesn’t record anything for you, meaning you’ll have to write it down somewhere.

Sulfur also has a handful of other minor issues, like typos and sentences that don’t really make as much sense as they should, which is a shame, because the game’s dialogue is very interesting when written properly.

The game also suffers from frame drops whenever there are too many enemies or items in a room, which is passable in other games, but inexcusable in a title with permanent item loss. Sulfur is thankfully very stable for the most part, but the larger floors might cut your frame rate in half just by having too many corpses in a specific spot.

Sulfur also tends to crash every once in a while when generating levels, although it only seems to happen once you are about to enter a run, and never during it. Thankfully, the game doesn’t make you lose any progress or items on crash, at most rolling back your progress to the floor before if your run is interrupted, which is very merciful.

Overall, Sulfur is an incredibly addictive shooter that manages to blend the dungeon-crawler and extraction shooter genres quite well. The amount of weapon variety is staggering, and customizing your arsenal is the highlight of the whole experience.

The game absolutely nails the highs and lows that come with permanent item loss, making you feel invincible once you have a fully customized loadout and miserable once you lose it all during a run.

The developer’s vision for the game seems quite unique, and the gameplay more than makes up for the minor issues that it currently has. Sulfur sits in a good spot as an Early Access title, and it shows a lot of promise.

Sulfur is available on Microsoft Windows (through Steam’s Early Access).