René Rother’s Children of the Sun is what would happen if the 2015 title Hatred had an actual point beyond listening to too much My Chemical Romance. Being a Devolver Digital published title, you don’t have to look at the Steam page to know that Rother’s first outing is slightly gory. It also features an almost anarchist style to its art by Nil Vendrell, Maria de la Puente, and Rocío Valentín. I would say it is grating, but only to the larger games industry, which pushes for “realism” that often ages poorly. The art direction is one that only makes sense when you play Children of the Sun.

The gameplay is simple to drill down, as you play as an angry young person with a rather big gun and supernatural powers. Almost similar to the generally terrible 2017 film from the Sniper series, the bullet from your sniper is somewhat laser-guided. I didn’t stutter, I meant bullet, singular. Each level you take on is an increasingly complex maze of targets to take out with a single shot. The difference is that (much like Yandu’s Yaka Arrow) you are guiding it after you’ve fired it into the crowd of cultists, presumably the titular Children of the Sun.

A majority of Children of the Sun uses scored video packages and almost still images focused on characters you have to infer the story from. Again, it is a great employment of the art to showcase our lead character’s twisted background and their desire to take down this group of David Koresh-led Branch Davidian wannabes. The trouble is, and it is a personal one, it makes it difficult to talk about specific characters without visual aids or general descriptions such as “pregnant woman,” “Clenched fist man,” or “our lead.” The latter is referred to in the “Sniper’s Handbook” (review guide) as “The Girl.”

Each level is a small puzzle of sorts, with the cultists of varying degrees of hierarchy doing different things and often dotted around fires, hidden behind certain objects, and sometimes standing around explosives. They’re my favorites. At the start of the level you’ll have a scouting-esque mode to tag each cultist and opportune shot; sometimes tagging wild-life too, as they offer a way around boring things like walls and roofs that stop your shots. Extra powers are drip-fed out as you progress, and you’ll have the chance to do trick shots through narrow gaps.

You’ll be making small bullet time corrections in mid-air, obtaining extra special powers from weak points, and even pulling off a 180 in mid-air like it is a Looney Tunes segment. Minus the screeching halt sound effects. You might be doing horrible things like blowing off the heads off cultists without remorse, but that’s kind of the point. The sound design (music by Aiden Baker) is almost devoid of congratulatory sound effects, just a low hollow drone punctured by a deep hit. Void is exactly it, you are made to feel as separated and emotionless from each kill as The Girl is.

Despite this numb hollowness you are made to feel as you mindlessly puncture armor plating and dance bullets on dimes, there is a constant desire to keep pushing forward in the story. Effectively killing your way up the ladder of this cult to make it to your former leader, a beardy-weirdy that calls himself “father…” or you called him that once. I don’t think it is made entirely clear, though maybe I was second-guessing the font option which is very stylized in that particular story-based level.

Options-wise, there are plenty of things to potentially help performance. I honestly wouldn’t know, I’ve run Children of the Sun as high as it will go (minus motion blur) the few hours I’d played to complete, and it was 60 across the board. The reason I bring up the options is the “lack” of accessibility: Thankfully there are individual sliders for audio, and there are sensitivity and inverted controls. However, for some levels having text-based storytelling, there is no simplified font option for anyone who might have dyslexia and find the stylized font difficult to read quickly.

Part of me also doesn’t want to ding Rother or Children of the Sun for that, though, as I almost want to say it is Rother reaching for the Suda51-style auteur status. Between the use of color in the art direction and the sound design, I’m almost reticent to say Children of the Sun reminds me of playing Killer7 again. There are fewer luchadors wearing suits and a cape, head butting bullets out of the air, but still an odd and wonderful experience nonetheless. The story is more comprehensible but the comparison is more so an assassin shooting painted men in puzzle-like gameplay.

As much as the story trundles along between sequential headshots, Children of the Sun will throw in an odd chapter: A Pacman-like mini-game to collect the bullets to kill the men. While 100% of Children of the Sun is controlled with just the mouse, that sometimes means gameplay changes like this are about as intuitive as riding a Great Mastiff balancing on a rocket-powered Roomba into battle. One of the later weird chapters has you driving a car avoiding bombs being thrown out the back of a pickup, only to end the level trying to fire your shot into something like 15 blokes’ heads.

Much like sniper gameplay, your movements in most of these are controlled by moving your mouse left and right. For the Pacman-like thing you don’t control movement but you control your player-head rotation, done with left and right click. Anyone who can get that right the first time without dying deserves to be hired for lots of money by whatever government agency wants to crack a foreign entity’s security system. That was probably the most difficult part of the game, as you bounce off of walls like a runaway bumper car.

Children of the Sun has many interesting twists on the shooting puzzles that you feel smart enough when you figure out the order. However, you never feel like “None of this is making sense.” Of course, there are moments of feeling stumped for a second, as the number in the top right tells you how many cultists are left on the map and you’ve yet to tag a few. Until you are in those final few chapters, “Valley Path” is a mountain of a difficulty spike. Every sniper-based level is logical and feels like a fault of my own, not Children of the Sun‘s.

At only a few hours long, a couple more if you’re a completionist, Children of the Sun is a well-paced, simple story of revenge that rarely lets up. There was a level or two I could have done without for the sake of pacing, and I think the difficulty in those final two chapters could have been better balanced alongside the rest of the game. Though as I think my glowing praise thus far has shown, I think Children of the Sun is a sleeper hit of the year.

Ultimately, Children of the Sun is a delightfully dark and twisted puzzle that not only supernaturally guides a bullet zig-zagging through cultist skulls, but also hauntingly plagues your memory to get a higher score on each level. Quicker times, more accurate shots, and how many shots are fired. While the leaderboards for each level aren’t consequential to your success, you’ll undoubtedly ask yourself how GunL0rd69 got so many points and why you are 138th on the scoreboard. With Children of the Sun, Rother has created a beautifully simple but artistic gameplay-first title in only his first major release.

A PC review copy of Children of the Sun was provided by Devolver Digital for this review.

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Children of the Sun

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Gameplay-first puzzles that are satisfying to beat.
• Staggeringly brilliant art direction.
• Hauntingly numb sound design and soundtrack.

Cons

• One or two difficulty spikes on a verticle incline.