There’s no shortage of games where you get to shoot guns. Weapons, in a broad sense, are the simplest, most straightforward interactive element in video games at large. With that in mind, I’m not ever going to blame you for wanting to shoot more guns in games, because oh boy oh howdy do I like my shooters. Not all shooters are made to the same standard of quality, of course, and today I’d like to highlight one of the games that I think sit towards the very pinnacle of this spectrum. In fact, I think this one may be the best FPS in its niche: Sulfur.
Sulfur is ostensibly a simple game. I can’t help but be reminded of Bungie’s old Pathways Into Darkness for some reason, and it might be the sheer vibe of it all and the surface-level goofiness of the experience. Sulfur basically puts you into the shoes of an unnamed, faceless Priest whose parish was eviscerated by a Sulfur-powered witch. In a snazzy intro cutscene, the game has our Priest flooring it after the witch through a forest before barreling straight into a tree to terminal effect. Except, his mysterious talisman brings him back out of a shallow grave. From that point on, you’re back at your parish in the woods with a handful of somewhat useful half-dead NPCs to support your efforts. As for what you’ll be doing in Sulfur, that bit should be obvious: shooting, shooting, and then shooting some more.
As a Roguelite (and no, it’s not a Roguelike, folks), Sulfur is all about iterative bursts of gameplay where you slowly but certainly up your arsenal bit by bit. You don’t need me to explain how these games work, given how many of them there are, but I do want to drive home just how sleek and incredibly satisfying this one is, in particular. And that’s telling coming from me, because Sulfur is basically a single-player extraction shooter. It’s just that it successfully elevates the concept beyond being, uh, Tarkovslop.
Sulfur looks astonishingly good. It boasts a simple, albeit effective visual style that immediately sets it apart from most any other Roguelike FPS. I’m sure some genre fans will have been put off by the cartooney, almost Happy Tree Friends or Adventure Time-style graphics, but good grief does it work in practice. What looks like a lovely, pastel-laden landscape with creepy crawlies mucking about turns into a Brutal Doom-style horror show once the Priest rolls up. This is not an overestimation, either. Depending on the gun you’re using and the ammo it’s shooting, enemies will turn into piles of horrific viscera at a moment’s notice.
The gunplay is the obvious first point of interaction you get out of Sulfur, and it feels awesome. Even the starter pistol, the P38 Dirk, will take chunks out of early-game Goblins. Perhaps more importantly, it’s got an awesome reload animation and supports the full brunt of the game’s gun customization features. Oh, yes, Sulfur‘s got that in droves. Just off the top of my head, each and every in-game gun can be tweaked with attachments (e.g. an ACOG), special oils (e.g. makes your bullets bigger, stronger, and heavier), and magical scrolls (e.g. your rounds explode on impact). On top of all of that, you can also tweak what ammunition your gun’s loading in the first place, so the puny 9-mil Dirk can suddenly become a .50 hand-cannon or, as is my preference, a mag-loaded 12-gauge shotgun. Sulfur‘s funny like that, you see.
It’s not even a matter of making weapons extremely customizable because there aren’t that many of them. No, I count a grand total of 44 unique (and I mean unique) melee and ranged weapons in Sulfur as of late July 2025, and the list is only growing with every new update. Crucially, Sulfur‘s guns aren’t wacky for the sake of being wacky. They all feel right at home in the game’s setting and are reasonably grounded, all things considered. You won’t get a poop gun like you might in Borderlands, for example, but you might come across a 5.56 SMG where the Priest just drops a handful of rounds into the conveyor belt-style loader to top it up.
I could wax lyrical about guns in Sulfur for ages, honestly, but then I’d have to ignore all of its other systems, and we can’t have that. Take cooking, for example: healing items are pretty hard to come by in this game, and instead you’ll often find yourself sourcing baseline ingredients for cooking. These might be mushrooms, chunks of Goblin (or Human!) meat, or even specific organs such as the liver. You take those to the nearest available cooking station, mix ’em up, and that’s your healing opportunity right there. Heaps of interactive elements and wacky combinations to be found here, and it ties in neatly with yet another important gameplay system: inventory management!
Like any self-respecting extraction shooter, Sulfur too has a Diablo-style grid inventory system that heavily limits the amount of loot you can lug around. Die, and you lose all of it, which is a bummer. More interestingly, though, Sulfur often forces you into prioritizing what matters more to you. Sure, you can load up on top-tier foodstuffs, but what if your guns break half-way through the Sewers? What if the game blesses you with a high-end TV, or if you come across a fancy new storage item? In the case of the former, for one, these are extremely expensive and otherwise useless items you can sell for a hefty profit back at the base. In the case of the latter, Sulfur has a bunch of unique storage items (like the fridge, the wardrobe, the safe, etc.) that will drop under certain conditions. Thing is, you’ll need to extract them to actually use them, and this will sometimes mean dedicating a huge chunk of your inventory to something that’s basically useless mid-mission. That’s loot triage for ya.
And, of course, I simply have to touch upon Sulfur‘s armor system too. Some of these items will be straightforward boosts to the Priest’s survivability, but often you’ll come across gimmicky goodies, too. The Sunglasses will, for example, protect you from a particularly annoying high-grade flashbang attack later on in the game, while wearing the Genie Shoe will add half a second’s worth of Coyote Time to your jumps, which is precisely what it sounds like.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of Sulfur‘s depth of itemization here, but I hope I’ve illustrated my point: this Early Access FPS’s meta-game puts most other full titles to shame in many respects! This isn’t a review, obviously, but I honestly feel like the sheer variety of mechanical content in Sulfur is a crucial reason why it keeps drawing me back in one run after another. It’s one of those games that are genuinely hard to stop playing, and that’s not the kind of praise I extend to many titles.
I don’t think Sulfur‘s going to stick around in Early Access for all that long anymore, really. The game released about a year ago, and the developer Perfect Random is now about half-way through its official Early Access roadmap, which means we’ve got about one more year of active development to go. The Desert biome update should be next on the docket, with the grand finale of the actual, literal witch-hunt slated for release after it. As-is, you’ll already be keen to keep playing Sulfur even after you’ve eviscerated your way through its 10ish currently available biomes. There’s such a wealth of content and variety present in the game on top of its excellent combat loop that you simply have to give it a shot. So, do yourself a service: give Sulfur a shot.
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