The combining of fantasy and history to create new stories has been a long-standing tradition in contemporary fiction: take a concept from real-world history, blend it with fantasy and watch the magic happen. Nowhere has this occurred more than with World War II, but Sumerian Six comes with its own particular flavour – the Nazis are, as you would expect, the bad guys of the story, but they choose to align themselves with an even greater evil.
Prime examples of this include the tabletop roleplaying game (and its video game adaptation). Achtung! Cthulhu, in which the Nazis are embroiled in all sorts of Lovecraftian occult affairs, or China Mieville’s book The Last Days of New Paris, in which the allies and rebels of France are embroiled in a four-way war between Nazis, demons and the concept of surrealism made real. So where do you go from here? Easy – you don’t: demons and occult creatures are scary enough.
Sumerian Six is just that, another take on the concept of the Nazis being a little bit more evil than usual; you play as the members of the former Enigma Squad, tasked with taking down one of your former members who has weaponised a substance known as Geistoff – a potent source of power that could provide the world with limitless power or fill it with paranormal evil. Either way, Geistoff is the kind of nasty ghost juice that you don’t want to be on the wrong end of, especially when it’s turned into a war-ending doomsday weapon.
Taking the form of a classic stealth-action romp, Sumerian Six embodies everything that makes stealth so enticing: vision cones give you a clear guide of where you can and can’t go, the environment is full of objects that can be used to create distractions (or “accidents”), and the enemies wander a clearly defined path. There’s something familiar and comfortable in the way everything conforms to the standards of a good stealth game, but it’s in the characters themselves that the gameplay becomes fleshed out.
Each of the six (as the name suggests) playable characters has their own slew of abilities and limitations to deal with – the smaller members of the team may struggle to move bodies or climb vines but can crawl through smaller spaces in a pinch, while others can utilise tools and otherworldly abilities to destroy bodies entirely, hitchhike along with moving guards and, in one particular case, turn into a bear and go to town on crowds of Nazi soldiers. This variety gives each character their own flavour while also giving you the opportunity to mix and match your team’s skills for maximum efficiency.
Most of Sumerian Six takes the form of real-time strategy and action, but thankfully there’s ample opportunity to plan and synchronise your actions; aside from guards generally following a fixed path unless the alarm is raised, you also have access to an action planner, a mode which freezes time and allows you to perform various different actions in sync with other characters. This could mean taking down multiple enemies at once or timing two tools to give you the best effect, but critically, it offers a brief respite to think ahead.
The opening area has a fairly linear flow to it, requiring you to follow a path set for you through the walls and defences of a castle that has limited room for branching, but later areas do a spectacular job of leaving the decision up to the player: do you take the cautious route around the enemy and risk exposure, or do you run headlong into cover and hope you avoid detection? Do you set a trap or whip out your weapon and start blasting? There are no correct answers, although the gun-toting might be better saved as a last resort.
All of these elements combine to create a game that feels familiar to fans of the genre, particularly for fans of Shadow Tactics, Shadow Gambit or Desperados III – after their closure in 2023, Mimimi Games, who developed all three of the above, left a huge hole in the market, but Artificer have excelled in filling the gap left behind – sadly, in producing a game of this kind, it also comes with the pitfalls that the genre has struggled with for some time.
The biggest issue most players will face if not better prepared is saving – though there are autosaves at certain points, the game is largely built around manual saving as the best bet for keeping a record of your actions. This can be tedious when you make a new save (and may I also recommend a new file) after clearing each small area, but one small mistake can lead you to lose massive amounts of progress if you aren’t careful. Alongside this comes the fact that some facets of the stealth are simply unreliable – if using the action planner, you may set up a perfect takedown without realising that you have accidentally wandered into sight of one of the enemies – much like a machine would drill into its own bed if you tell it to, the game will still proceed headlong into danger regardless of how carefully you planned your moves.
