Sunday Gold

Timing is everything during a heist, but seldom as obviously as in Sunday Gold – a point-and-click crime caper that is technically a single 15–20-hour turn-based RPG encounter, played out in mansions, warehouses and laboratories across a near-future London.

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Whether in combat or scouring 2D backdrops for clues and tools, the game’s cast of career criminals take turns to spend points on actions such as rifling through lockers or pulling levers. While no enemies are visible during exploration, ending the turn usually raises the local alertness level, sometimes triggering a scrap. It fills what might otherwise be laidback escape-room puzzles with urgency. Rather than fiddling at leisure, you try to crack each riddle in one fell swoop, picking terrain interactions as efficiently as you do special attacks in the fray.

It’s an unlikely and initially exciting core concept, particularly when the game plays up the antagonism between its two halves. The sharing of action points aside, each party member has a Composure stat reminiscent of Darkest Dungeon’s sanity mechanics. Lose Composure in combat, and puzzles may be harder to solve. The first heist, for example, features a scenario in which your electronics whiz, Gavin, must shut down an alarm system while the party fends off security guards and drones. The trouble is that when Gavin’s Composure is low, he starts to hallucinate, including while using his color-coded hacking tool. It works the other way round, too: elsewhere, the game asks you to search a corpse for a keycard, taking a Composure hit for every pocket you check. Having rummaged a bit too avidly, our characters had to deal with garbled menu options, misfiring special abilities and time-limited turns during the brawl.