Children of the Sun review: Revenge written on a magic bullet

Look all you want from your safe vantage point in the woods. You’ll never be able to see them all, but that’s okay. Your bullet will find them all eventually because that’s what makes you special. They took something important from you, and now you’re going to use that something special to make them pay. Children of the Sun is a moody puzzle. It’s a sniper game with a supernatural twist. And it ends up turning a dark and disorienting revenge plot into a creative puzzle-solving experience as you try to sort out each level with grim accuracy.

Show your bullet the way

Children of the Sun’s moody narrative begins with the self-inflicted death of a young girl’s father. Small context clues tell us her family was part of a cult and she blames that cult for what’s become of her family. She takes the rifle her father did himself in with and goes on a rampage, heading settlement to settlement and slaying cultists wherever she can. For such a young girl with only a single bullet in a sniper rifle, the girl has a special gift. Once her bullet hits a target, she can control and fire it to a new target. In each level, your goal is to weave her bullet through the environment, slaying cultists and ensuring none make it out alive.

Children of the Sun’s presentation is harsh and disorienting. Between levels, often times, is a stuttering array of imagery that paints little bits of the overall picture when it comes to how the girl and her family joined the cult, where she discovered her powers, what it did to their family, and how the cult betrayed them. The levels themselves sometimes change up drastically as well. The standard level has you standing on the outskirts of an environment plotting cultist murders and taking your magic shot, but sometimes you’ll wander dream-like (or nightmare-like) scapes, interacting with characters, or playing a strange arcade-like game as she cleans her rifle. Just when you think you have it sorted, Children of the Sun gets more crazy, and it continually escalates well into the game.

The narrative in Children of the Sun is quite jarring, so much so that it almost slips into uncomfortable to look at. It’s not the context, though it is very dark, but just the flashing presentation and quick transitions before you can make sense of much. The aforementioned arcade section hits you with a flash of loud colors before dumping you into the game. It’s a bit aggressive in its intensity, even if much of it serves the bizarre and moody narrative. Still, the levels, cultists, and navigation are more cohesive and highly enjoyable.

No matter where they hide

The normal gameplay of Children of the Sun runs level-by-level. In each level, your character is placed at a vantage point on the edge of a cult settlement. You can move around a little bit, spot and mark enemies, and choose a position to take your shot. The goal is to kill every one of the cultists to end the level, and the main gimmick is that once you start your first shot and make your first kill, you can redirect the bullet in slow-motion and fire again from the position of that first kill to the next. Each time you score a kill, you adjust your direction in first-person and fire the bullet again until all enemies are dead, or you miss and fail, having to restart the stage.

Children of the Sun is a straightforward puzzle at first. In early levels, many of your foes will be in plain sight and you only need dispatch them one by one. However, later levels will have you weaving your bullet in and around buildings, shooting gas tanks on cars, dispatching foes in armor and using body shields, and plenty more. Thankfully, you also gain further abilities as you go as well, such as the ability to slow time and adjust your bullet’s direction midflight, allowing you to bend it around obstacles to hit otherwise unhittable targets. Every new challenge and added capability lends just a bit more complexity to the puzzles, and they are satisfying to work out.

If solving the puzzle wasn’t good enough, you can also test yourself against online leaderboards that test how many direction-changing shots you too, the distance your bullet traveled, multipliers for quick successive shots, body parts hit, and time spent in the level. Figuring out the optimal route will be a fun challenge if you want to rank high among other players.

If Children of the Sun’s gameplay is stifled by anything, it’s how very abrupt and non-explanatory it is. You don’t get a map or indicators of where targets are in a level outside of marking them when you see them, and that means some levels require a lot of trial and error simply to figure out where all of your targets are before you can even work out the puzzle. Similarly, there was a driving section that took me a long time to sort out what I was supposed to do and even then, I’m not sure what I did to trigger the way to move forward because there wasn’t much to tell me what went right or what I wasn’t doing before. These are times when Children of the Sun’s vagueness works against it.

Make it dance between them

Children of the Sun is an absolutely weird game, but in a lot of good ways. The narrative and aesthetic are intensely gloomy and disorienting, the puzzles of how to dispatch all cultists in any given level are smart and engaging, and the alternate gameplay sections aside the main shooting levels are unique enough to keep things interesting. Its abrupt nature can sometimes get in the way of its purpose and progression, sometimes for lack of clarity and sometimes for lack of any info whatsoever beyond personal experimentation. That said, Children of the Sun excels where it counts. It’s a cerebral puzzle in which you weave a bullet between targets, and solving the puzzle is dangerously satisfying.

This review is based on a PC digital copy supplied by the publisher. Children of the Sun comes out on April 9, 2024, on PC.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.