As it stands right now, Children of the Sun is a little too edgy for my taste, but it has some interesting ideas about spatial puzzle solving that I think have a lot of merit.
Children of the Sun is a new game from solo developer René Rother, published by Devolver Digital. It is about a young girl whose family is ruthlessly murdered by The Cult. Who are The Cult? What do they stand for? It doesn’t really matter. This is a story about revenge being served cold and at range from a high-calibre sniper rifle. What Children of the Sun really is, at its heart, is a puzzle game.
My Baby Shot Me Down
Playing as The Girl, you take up a position outside various Cult locations and hotspots. Moving the mouse left or right moves The Girl in a wide circle around the perimeter of the level. Enemies are highlighted in bright yellow so that you can spot them. Clicking the left mouse button draws the gun to The Girl’s eye so she can look down the scope. Rolling the mouse wheel up and down controls the telescopic zoom. Clicking the zoom wheel will mark an enemy when your crosshairs are on them. Once you’ve tagged all the enemies in a given level, you now have to take them out, and herein lies the rub: you’ve only got one bullet.
This is where Children of the Sun sets itself apart from other sniper-styled shooters: you’ve got one physics-defying bullet and that must be piloted from foe to foe until every last one of them is dead. It’s like a bizarre mash-up of Sniper Elite and Yondu’s whistle-powered dart thing from Guardians of the Galaxy. The game never explains how The Girl is able to do this. I don’t know if she’s controlling the bullet with her mind, or if she’s simply a master of the ricochet. I suppose it doesn’t really matter.
But there’s more. As the demo progresses, The Girl gains extra shooting abilities. The first lets you slightly bend the bullet’s trajectory to sweep it around blind corners and land a shot. Another requires striking two enemies in their glowing weak spots, one after the other. Doing so grants the ability to defy physics and completely change the bullet’s trajectory mid-flight. Doing so lets you send it fanging away in whatever direction is most useful to you in the moment.
Each level in Children of the Sun is constructed in a way where lines of sight between foes are frequently blocked. Solving these problems is often a matter of changing perspective while the bullet is in flight. The Girl can target birds in the sky to gain a height advantage. You can also use it to trigger traps: Cars strewn around each level can be struck in the petrol tank cover and made to explode, potentially killing several enemies at once.
Once the final enemy is dispatched, the level ends and you are awarded points for style, speed, and sophistication. The more attempts you make, the fewer points you’ll get at the end. You’re also given a topographical view of the level’s map and the path your bullet traced through it. These paths can be saved for those who want to dig into the details and optimise their lethality level-to-level.
I like all of this a lot. I think the design of Children of the Sun is really interesting, and puzzling out how to fling a bullet around a level in a way that lets you get everyone is satisfying.
It makes me wish I liked everything else about the game more.
Welcome To My Twisted Mind Dot JPEG
I mentioned at the top of this preview that Children of the Sun is an edgy sort of game, and it is. In a manner that recalls Hotline Miami, this is a game that wants you to feel uneasy and uncomfortable. The Girl is a weird, wretched little goblin with greasy hair and a creepy mask. The screens between levels have her slouching toward her next target, an unstoppable, inexorable force of darkness. She is a void in the world, a wandering black hole in the space where a person should be.
The visuals are deliberately stylised to recall a PlayStation 1 game, but tweak the colours and the vibe enough to make them take on an abstracted, nightmarish quality. Whenever the girl moves, her footfalls are accompanied by the heavy pluck of a bass guitar. Behind it all, an oppressive hum pervades the game’s entire soundstage. Everything is tweaked to communicate the feeling of being a coiled snake, waiting in the tall grass for the moment to strike.
Throughout the demo’s short campaign, minigames pop up for you to complete. One, which saw The Girl cleaning and reloading her gun, involved a Pac-Man style maze game. An 8-bit screen appears in front of you with the message, “I shot a man and killed him, and now I’m horny.”
Righto. Keep it to yourself, lady.
It’s all very Welcome To My Twisted Mind type shit. This kind of weird reverence for the insane lone wolf with a gun feels like the kind of thing an edgy 15-year-old boy would think is cool. At 39, I find it all fairly offputting. The game doesn’t seem all that interested in The Girl’s trauma, the monster her desire to destroy The Cult has turned her into, or even the well-trodden narrative territory of revenge. Good art should, at the very least, have something to say and Children of the Sun, for now at least, seems content with grimdark window dressing. I hope this is all just placeholder stuff for now. I hope the full game finds something meaningful to say about this horrid little swamp creature it has loosed upon the world.
Children of the Sun: Final Thoughts
It’s rare my vibe on a game is this riven down the middle. I like just about everything Children of the Sun is doing mechanically. I think there’s a lot of smart and considered design work happening here. On the other hand, I think its overly edgy approach to story, setting, character, and presentation makes it the kind of thing I only want to play in short spurts.
Again, your mileage may vary. You can check it out for yourself when the demo goes live for Steam Next Fest.
Preview conducted on PC with an early access build provided by the publisher. You can play the demo during Steam Next Fest.
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