Games worth discovering

This indie mash-up of Superhot and Sniper Elite is a spooky good time

3K View2024-02-06

Children of the Sun

TacticalReal Time TacticsDarkActionStrategySingleplayerArcadeThird Person

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SHOULD I PLAY CHILDREN OF THE SUN?

Check this out if you enjoyed the hidden genius of hyper-violent indie games like Superhot or Hotline Miami. Children of the Sun looks like a lo-fi, pulp sendup of the Sniper Elite series, but it’s really more of a puzzle game about creating the perfect trajectory for a single demonically possessed rifle bullet. As a masked young woman, your job is to scout each location from the perimeter, line up the perfect shot, and fire—and then, as your bullet strikes your victim, redirect the bullet to continue its path into the next creepy cultist. You get one shot per map to clear out all the cultists, so you need to use every advantage available to pull it off.

TIME PLAYED

I played just under an hour of Children of the Sun, which was how long it took me to complete all seven levels in the free demo that’s currently available as part of Steam Next Fest. The demo didn’t feature any unlockables like new equipment or abilities, but it did introduce some more advanced concepts, like bending a bullet’s path in flight, or even activating a special power that allowed me to freely redirect a bullet in midair without hitting an enemy.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT CHILDREN OF THE SUN?

• Deceptively tricky puzzles. Children of the Sun seems simple enough, but the difficulty ramped up quickly as I progressed through the demo. Sure, it was easy to wipe out a whole campsite full of cultists simply by pinging my bullet from one headshot to the next, but I eventually got to maps where multiple groups of bad guys were congrating on opposite sides of the map, and even one in which two carloads of them were constantly doing loops around the area.

• Excellent style. Children of the Sun is highly stylized and reminded me of the swimmy psychedelia of Hotline Miami and the deliberate, dreamy color palette of El Paso, Elsewhere. The overall effect was part grindhouse horror movie, part Midwest vaporwave. Between levels, bits of the story flashed by in hand-drawn graphic novel-style image sequences. I’m still not exactly sure what’s going on, but it seems this cult was responsible for some pretty bad stuff.

• Slick control scheme. I started out playing Children of the Sun with my Xbox controller, but switched when I realized that the “keyboard” part of the keyboard and mouse control scheme was entirely unnecessary. Before I lined up my sights, my mouse directed her to run right and left along a fixed track near the edge of the map. Left clicking zoomed in, and another left click pulled the trigger. Holding the right mouse button let me slow time and adjust the bullet’s path, and when I hit two enemy weak spots, I was able to right click to re-aim the bullet while it was midair.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN CHILDREN OF THE SUN?

• Some puzzles hide information. There were a couple puzzles in the demo that would have been impossible for me to solve on my first try, because enemy positions were concealed by the environment until I had fired into the area. In those cases I just had to try to spot as many enemies as I could, then fail the attempt and try again. This kind of puzzle design always rubs me the wrong way.

• Alignment issues. In a couple places, I found that my bullet wasn’t quite going where I had placed the crosshairs, and it would strike a rock or other object in the environment even when I had carefully aimed around it. This may be due to the bullet being a physical object in the game world, but it was still annoying.

• The bullet that flies around the map is a full cartridge. This one’s mainly going to annoy gun nerds, but yeah: the model of the bullet I fired included the entire cartridge, including the casing that holds the explosive gunpowder and is ejected after firing. There’s no gameplay downside to this, but it’ll make the Steam forums harder to use thanks to range pedants constantly complaining about it.