Children of the Sun Review - Left Wanting For More

It's not uncommon to see games about revenge-driven protagonists, murderous psychic cults, and stories where you leave a trail of bodies in your wake. What makes Children of the Sun's approach to this unique however is that it's told through cleverly veiled puzzle mechanics.

In Children of the Sun, you play as a mask-wearing protagonist, once a part of the titular cult, you now turn your attention to tracking down and killing its members and their Charles Manson-esc leader.

The story of this game is fairly light, told as a series of 'comic book' cutscenes showing the protagonist on their present-day mission, the reaction from the Cult Leader and the aftermath of destruction, and flashbacks to the protagonist's life growing up, being in the cult, the death of their family, and their escape.

From Lackeys To Cult Leaders

Dropping into a level you begin on the outskirts of a group of cultists, at the beginning of the game this might be a few cultists sitting around a fire but as the game progresses you'll start approaching them in small towns and even compounds. It all begins when you take your first shot.

Each time you successfully hit a target that target will become where you'll take your next shot from. The puzzle in Children of the Sun is figuring out how to take out each of the targets in order to make sure you can reach them all. Finishing a level you'll create an interesting daisy chain of cultists as you leap from target to target.

This is a very easy concept at the start of the game when everyone is out in the open, once things like multi-story buildings and fast-moving targets come into play there's a lot of planning that you'll need to put into making sure you have a way to get out of an enclosed space before you go in there.

Children of the Sun Powers

Locations aren't the only element that will change as you progress. There are three additional powers that you gain access to as the story progresses. The first ability lets you slightly bend the bullet's trajectory mid-flight, the second ability allows you to pause your bullet in mid-air and refire it in a different direction, and the third lets you speed up the bullet to pierce through armor.

I enjoyed the additional gameplay elements and how it would alter the way you'd pick your shots, you'd want to prioritize armored enemies if you're far enough away before you pick off the unarmored ones at a closer range.

I was disappointed to see that there were no permutations of abilities to change things up. Once you had all three powers that was it. I would have enjoyed trying a level where you could only use the armor-piercing ability, or where the armor-piercing was taken away from you and you instead needed to use explosions to kill those enemies. There are certainly places where these abilities and enemy mechanics could have been further expanded upon.

Completing a level you're rewarded with a top-down view of the line of death that you carved in the mission and points are awarded. Points are earned for shot placement and distances of shots, while they're lost for the number of shots fired and the speed at which you completed the level. It was a lot of fun to learn the correct pattern for a level and repeat it over and over again pushing for a faster time.

The game is broken up into individual levels, most focus on the core experience of shooting cult members until none remain and moving on but there are also a few that shake things up by adding in different arcade-style minigames.

The art direction of Children of the Sun is excellent. The graininess of the world, retro-inspired graphics and models, and the comic look of the cutscenes set the tone for the adventure you're about to take so quickly.

For a game that's all about spotting targets from a distance, and navigating through the world everything was also extremely legible. I never felt like it was hard to distinguish what I was looking at without the need to zoom in or be unsure of where my next target was.

Children of the Sun Review | Final Thoughts

In my preview of Children of the Sun, I praised what I had played so far, commenting that the game "understands its core mechanic and immediately nails it." After completing the game, with its 4-hour runtime, I do still feel like it knew what it wanted to be, but I couldn't help but feel like there were some simple ideas that could have taken the experience to the next level.

Overall if you're interested in checking out a unique puzzle shooter game and have a spare few hours I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

Children of the Sun was reviewed on PC with a code provided by the publisher over roughly 4 hours of gameplay. All screenshots in this review were taken by the reviewer during gameplay.