In many ways, Children Of The Sun is a game you can relate to. I don’t have telekinetic powers that allow me to control the trajectory of a sniper rifle bullet, and I wasn’t part of the murderous cult that killed my father. But if I were, and I was, you can bet I’d be on a revenge spree! Stepping into the grubby sneakers and unwashed jacket of the protagonist – a misused girl who vibes like a member of Gorillaz – you fire a single bullet from your gun and control it in first person, piercing the heads, hearts and arms of cultists scattered around the level. It’s a satisfying Sniper Elite meets Superhot puzzle game of ultra-violence, and it’s fun.
Devolver tends to choose games that have a certain feel, and Children Of The Sun (the name of the cult in question, as well as the game itself) begins with a guard peeing in front of the camera. There’s a lot of crunchy visual noise in this game that makes it undeniably stylish. A girl creeps along the edges of a level in darkness, while cultists patrol or gather in various locations around the center, flashing as golden blobs against the contrasting orange, pink, and shadowy levels. You commit a gruesome murder in a world made of blackjacks and fruit salads. When your bullet hits someone, their faceless, mannequin-like muppet body explodes, not in confetti but in wine-dark blood, and people nearby start running for cover – but all in snail-paced motion as you re-aim to send the bullet flying again.
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Since you only have one bullet, the name of the game is to kill all the guys in the level without hitting anything that isn’t a guy – if you hit a wall, tree, stick or the edge of a windowsill, it’s over. Some additional caveats are added as you progress. You can hold down the right mouse button to steer the missile in snail-paced motion, although it has the turning radius of a container ship sailing through the Suez Canal. Enemies have glowing delicate points, and if you hit them specifically, you can take advantage of the ability to completely change the trajectory of the missile. You can also hold down the left mouse button to accelerate the missile far enough, which is the only way to defeat an armored enemy. Useful: you can shoot a flying bird as a freebie, allowing you to reorient yourself or get a wider view of the level, or a vehicle’s fuel cap (or just fuel barrels) for effective explosion kills.
In opposition to your growing skill, the levels become more challenging and there are more evil cultists to fight. Some of them have long shields that protect them from the front, others have full armor. Ride-along cultists are moving targets, while psychic cultists can knock your projectile out of the way. This forces you to adapt your tactics. Where previously you could dash around and knock down body dominoes one by one, the increasing complexity forces you, for example, to hit a few delicate points of a normal enemy first, so you can aim deliberately away from an armored enemy to gain distance, then utilize the re-aim skill you’ve just acquired to turn around and kill the armored foe. That’s a good thing, and you’re quickly trying to outdo yourself – and the players on the leaderboard that’s displayed after each level – by using fewer hits or scoring extra points by hitting the gas cap on a moving jeep.
What’s more frustrating is the ramping up of difficulty through the level architecture. You respect the craftsmanship of it – the multiple huts, the cultist unloading something in a shipping crate, the blazing fires that make it demanding to spot the cultist’s golden life marker – but at the same time, there’s a built-in need in Children Of The Sun to play the later levels multiple times, knowing you’ll fail. You can mark enemies when you spot them, and that marker will persist across level restarts, and the fact is that it can sometimes take a while to spot the last guard or two hiding behind a haystack or in a room somewhere plot reboots. It can suck the joy out of mindless murder. I remember one level, a karaoke party in an abandoned apartment building, in particular, both because I was able to blow up about half a dozen guys at once, but also because it took me a hell of a long time to find the last hanger, and by the time you figure out where all the parts are, you can’t plan the perfect shot to finish them off. There’s a line between “Fuck yeah!” and “Fucksake!” that I think Children Of The Sun crosses at times.
Still, I’m sure others will enjoy the replayability, considering this is a game where you can repeat your magical murder spree over and over again. I think the part I disliked the most was the story. There’s not much in the way of environmental storytelling, as the pace of each level doesn’t leave much room to absorb the details of each scene. Instead, there are 2D cutscenes and a few interactive moments that serve to provide more emotional context. Children Of The Sun isn’t, we can agree, a particularly subtle game (the girl has NO PEACE written on the back of her jacket), but I’m afraid that some of the moments felt a bit silly to me, especially the one where the girl has to walk through calf-deep water in a dreamlike void and kneel before more cultists.
still, I can’t give Children Of The Sun a proper rating because it’s original and well-made, and it’s about four hours of bursting blood balloons. It’s an intense little category movie with a ton of style. That kind of originality should be encouraged.
The review was based on a copy of the game provided by publisher Devolver Digital.
