Children of the Sun Preview - Fresh Headshot Puzzle Game

"A tense, surreal, sniping focused pursuit of revenge against a ruthless cult" is how Childen of the Sun describes itself. Now throw away all ideas of gameplay that your mind might have already started filling in to be ready to play a unique and addictive puzzle game from solo game developer Rene Rother and publisher Devolver Digital.

In Children of the Sun you play as the revenge-driven protagonist whose family and life was destroyed by the titular cult. Now that you're free from them it's time to make them pay by wiping out every member from the lowly foot soldiers all the way to the leader himself.

The story of Children of the Sun is told through cutscenes with little to no dialogue highlighting the protagonist's experience with the cult. These provide a good context to the harm the cult has done but aren't intrusive to the core experience.

Roadmap To Revenge Against The Children Of The Sun

Your revenge on the cult is broken up into levels. Starting each level on the fringe of a cult encampment you'll peer through your sniper rifle, mark your prey, and fire. After you hit a cult member you'll get to fire another shot from the position of your target. 

Repeat this process until you've managed to kill every cultist in the level to move on. Ending the level you'll be awarded a score based on how clean your kills were, how many shots you needed, and how quickly you completed the level.

Very quickly complications are added to Children of the Sun as different cultists are leaning behind cars, inside buildings, or even doing donuts in cars. The puzzle becomes which cultists can see each other and what the most efficient way to leapfrog from one to another is.

Murder, Rinse, and Repeat

Getting to explore the twenty or so levels in this two-hour preview of Children of the Sun I found myself breaking each level into three different play styles. The first would be reconnaissance, scouting out as many cultists as I could from the bushes before taking a shot to get a closer look.

Once I had marked all of the cultists I would complete the level to understand where they were in relation to one another and who had a clear line of sight.

After that, I spent at least three more attempts per level working on building up a high score. Which cultists were the furthest apart that I could still see, how would each slowly move through the level, was there a way I could set off an explosion to kill two at a time?

Each level from start to finish only takes 15-30 seconds and even less as you get used to it. Combined with fast resets this quick gameplay loop will definitely hook players.

Building upon the formula

Just when you feel you've understood the core mechanics of the game you're given the ability to slow down time and slightly turn bullets in mid-flight. Suddenly your thinking of "line of sight" or "What is the best path to kill the cultists?" is shifted as you can snake around obstacles.

Nailing a headshot from halfway across the map already felt good, getting to fire a bullet that snakes through a house to hit an unseen enemy is a whole different level of satisfaction though.

This preview only gave me access to the ability to curve bullets and to hit enemy weak points to completely realign trajectory but I can expect that more abilities will shake up the game as you play further.

The way each level represents the powers available to the player also makes me think that as new features are added some abilities you rely on might be taken away from you, but that's just speculation at this time.

Children of the Sun Preview | Final Thoughts

Children of the Sun is an excellent example of a puzzle game, like the Portal series or The Witness, that understands its core mechanic and immediately nails it. Simple for a player to understand and satisfying to continue to master.

I was hooked from the first level and each smart iteration of the core mechanic kept subsequent levels fresh and fun.

I've only played two hours of Children of the Sun and I'm already looking forward to seeing the full release of this title, as well as what competitive communities like speedrunners are able to do.

Children of the Sun was previewed on PC with a key provided by the publisher over the course of 2 hours. All screenshots were taken by the previewer over the course of gameplay.