Children of the Sun

Written by Nathan Carter on 4/9/2024 for PC  

Children of the Sun is a pretty unique game. It's a puzzle game, but also a shooting/action game. The puzzle aspect comes from having to complete each level with only a single bullet. It's a pretty simple concept and it works extremely well, especially for the story the game is telling. While Children of the Sun is on the short side, it starts off simple and gets more challenging over time, and it is a ton of fun. 

You play as a nameless young girl in a quest to get revenge against a cult that murdered a loved one of yours, and you don't get much else in terms of the story. Most of the story itself is told through the gameplay itself as you go through level after level, murdering cult members with a single bullet from a sniper. Every few levels or so you do get some short story cutscenes in the form of mainly still images, but they are few and far between and go by so quickly that it's hard to comprehend what is even going on. The catch with this game is that you only get a single shot to kill everyone in the level, as your character has telekinetic powers and can control the path of the bullet. If you kill an enemy, the bullet will stop and then you can line up your next shot. Think of it as drawing a straight line to different targets on a map. If you miss and the bullet hits a non target then you fail and have to start over again. 

Over the course of the game, you get new abilities including the ability to change the trajectory of a bullet, change the direction of the bullet, and the ability to speed up the bullet. All of these abilities will become crucial to completing levels, as they will start introducing enemies that have shields, or enemies in moving vehicles and heavy armor which can only be killed by a sped up bullet from a certain distance. You'll start getting levels in places like a motel or a city street, meaning enemies can be hiding inside buildings or behind cars and buildings on the other side of the map. A couple of these levels took me a few times to complete but never felt like they were impossible to finish. Usually I would spend a few turns flying the bullet around the map looking for all the enemies. Thankfully, you can tag enemies when you find them and they will stay tagged even if you fail a level and have to start over. That is, until the final stretch of the game. 

The difficulty does spike in the final levels, because this is when they start introducing enemies that float in the air and have a protective bubble around them. You have to first shoot the bubble and then you have to change the direction of the bullet and hit the enemy while the bubble is down. The difficulty stems from the fact that you have a very short amount of time to be able to do this. For most of the game you can take your time lining up shots or planning out a route. With the bubble enemies if you don't kill them immediately, the bubble goes back up and usually this means you're gonna want to just restart because you wasted a charge to be able to turn the bullet around. This is when the game slightly veers into frustrating territory, especially if you get all the way to those final few enemies but then have to do the whole thing over again because you couldn't kill one of the bubble enemies in time. That said, never in the game was I not having fun and the game eventually provides enough variety with enemies and abilities that it doesn't feel like it gets stale. 

It should be noted that this game is extremely short and only took me about four hours total to finish. That said, I do think there is a lot of replayability here. Each level has it's own leaderboard and you can compare your score with others that have played the game. You can find easy ways to finish the level, but you really want to focus on completing each level as quickly as possible, in the fastest route possible, while also maximizing points by hitting other objects like gas tanks or birds while getting multi-kills and headshots. My scores weren't even close to the top of the leaderboard. It will also be interesting to see if the speed running community takes to this game, because I can easily see this being a fun one to play over and over again to find those fastest routes and strats possible for a speedy completion. 

Children of the Sun is a very unique game that I think works really well even with it's short length. I love the atmosphere, the art style, and the gameplay itself and can see myself playing this more and trying to increase my high scores. I wish the story would have been a little more in depth, and I actually wish there were more levels as there is a lot of potential here in terms of what you could do with this concept. That said, I don't think you could go wrong with Children of the Sun if you were looking for a different kind of puzzle game to play.