Children of the Sun is a pulpy fever dream developed by one man and published by Devolver Digital. If you took Suda 51’s Killer7, and combined it with Sniper Elite, SuperHot and Mandy, then you’d end up with something resembling René Rother’s Children of the Sun. It works beyond just being a dynamic piece of visual art too, containing some extremely satisfying gameplay that feels crunchy and tactile.
Children of the Sun is out now for PC.
Let’s just get the discussion of the game’s visuals out of the way first, because Children of the Sun is truly striking to look at. In terms of its presentation, it resembles a particularly nasty 70s grindhouse movie that has been thoroughly soaked in bleach. It is extremely stylish, at times reminding me a lot of the visual flair seen in El Paso, Elsewhere.
In fact, it shares more with El Paso, Elsewhere than just visual flair, with both having an undeniably moreish quality to them. Each stage is so short and so satisfying to work through that it is really easy to get sucked into playing this game for hours on end. I completed the entirety of Children of the Sun in two sittings, which is an increasingly rare thing for me to do with games recently.
Children of the Sun actually also fits nicely in right alongside some other bold-looking titles also published by Devolver like Hotline Miami. Both games share more than a color scheme though. Like Hotline Miami, Children of the Sun’s narrative tells of a violent psychedelic tragedy told via mute cutscenes, with the increasingly corrupted mental state of the player character being portrayed via the game’s twisted neon visuals in both cases.
And it works, portraying a cold revenge story, devoid of any real emotion other than mania. At no point do you feel as though you are playing as the “good guy” here. Instead you are a character acting on pure instinct, hell-bent on righting the wrong that she suffered, no matter how many lives need to be violently taken to achieve that.
Here Comes the Sun… die, die, die, die
The slow motion violence seen in the game is caused due to the seemingly supernatural ability that the protagonist has to manually control the direction of their single bullet fired at will. Once you pick you first target and pull that trigger, the camera the follows along the path of the bullet in the style of Sniper Elite.
Once that target is missing a head and spouting blood from their neck hole, time slows down as it does in SuperHot, allowing you to re-direct that bullet towards your next enemy’s cranium. The challenge comes when that next enemy is standing behind and obstruction like a wall. This introduces the puzzle element of the game which forces the player to get creative in order to eliminate all enemies in the level.
Alongside Children of the Sun being an addictive experience it also encourages replayability. The scorecard that appears at the end of each level grants a score based on the player’s performance, this encourages players to try again to see if they can complete the level quicker or in less shots. All of this feels snappy and moves the narrative along at a clip, which is just as well really given how dour everything feels.
That is one of the game’s biggest challenges. If you strip away the creatively satisfying-though-repetitive gameplay, Children of the Sun is essentially a vibes-only game. The issue is that the vibes are dour as hell. This is not a feel good title, nor does it glorify the revenge fantasy. The whole crusade that your character is embarking on is hopeless, and all the way through the game takes itself very seriously.
Short and not so sweet
Then you are forced to consider the catch-22 of the game’s short runtime. Would you rather a title that feels as though it ends just as it is about to hit its stride, or would you rather suffer for longer stuck in this dire world, with things beginning to feel more repetitive with every additional hour of gameplay?
Given its reasonable price of admission, then I would say that Children of the Sun is worth checking out if you are a PC player. With that being said, console players are onto plumbs given that there are apparently no current plans to bring port this title across from PC. It always sucks to see a game stranded on PC, and this is no different.
Overall, Children of the Sun is a title that features some truly novel ideas, some great sound design and some striking imagery that will hang around in your brain for a long time after playing. It is a great way to spend a few hours, although it is a bit of a shame that there isn’t any more to it. What is here is solid, and more than enough to entertain fans of the macabre revenge genre.
Children of the Sun – 7/10
