I finally got some extra money this last week, so naturally I spent all of it on games I wanted to play. It is going to be a Devolver Digital couple of weeks as I bought primarily games from them. Devolver holds a special place in my heart as they publish games I don’t think anyone else would. That goes for this week’s game; a gritty fucking video game about connecting shots, killing a bunch of people, and racking up as many points as possible. This week is Children of the Sun.

Children of The Sun is a puzzle shooter from René Rother and Devolver Digital. The game was released on April 9th on Steam for $15.

You play as a young girl with the power to make a single bullet go wherever you the hell she wants it to go. Blind with revenge for the cult that killed her family, she is out for fucking BLOOD. travel to various locations and plot out the most efficient way to take out the baddies to get to the biggest bad guy.

There isn’t much to go on just memories of times when the cult taught you everything about shooting and how they took everything away. It is presented to the player in a way that normalizes killing so many of the freaks. It’s not hard for me to hate cults so it was incredibly easy for me.

Gameplay is where Children of the Sun stands out. Half shooter, quarter part puzzle, and the rest is given to bullet time. I love me some bullet time and this young girl can control the trajectory of the one single bullet she can shoot out of her hunting rifle.

Each section starts out with the ability to find a preferred vantage point, scoping up and shooting. After shooting the player has the ability to change direction slightly to hit the mark, once hit then the bullet can be shot in any direction. Aim correctly because you have only one bullet to take down all of the enemies in the area.

Environmental hazards exist to help you when you misplace a shot. Gas tanks from cars and a random assortment of explosives are littered in areas to save you from a crooked shot.

Later on, the game introduces new ways to kill baddies and with that more elaborate levels to test your ability to solve how to kill 15 people but 10 of them are inside different rooms in a singular building.

More and more advanced ways to take people out are introduced keeping the gameplay fresh all the way up until the last mission.

The game makes you think but pushes you to succeed

Points are given in a multitude of different ways: hitting headshots, dickshots, hitting gas tanks, killing with said gas tanks, moving targets and the lost goes on. The faster you kill the faster the points wrack up. After gunning down every cultist in the area the points are then tallied and put into an online leaderboard for all to see.

I will never be able to top some player’s high score, that shit is unreasonably high.

Challenges are proposed at every level to add to the difficulty, for instance: One shot and 2 kills, Tagging all the enemies before killing them and even navigating bullets through the environment properly. It is all fun and really makes you think about how to navigate the level.

I said in the demo talk that Children of the Sun “has the colors that remind me of Hotline Miami” but after playing the game for almost four hours all I want to say is that the game is truly unique in its color palette. It feels like I am on a trip while being in a fever dream. It is so colorful, it’s grungy and gritty. The blood splatter after every shot goes literally everywhere and the purples, blacks, yellows, and all those other colors really make the blood POP (like the gourds of the cultists). Rad design.

The sound design accompanies the look of the game really well. The game is grungy so naturally the music that plays HAS to have some grunge to it. after eradicating all of the freaks in the mission area the player is met with some of the most grungy shredding guitars I’ve ever heard. It was so loud the first time that It almost blew my speakers to smithereens.

Children of the Sun is a fun game that lasts the perfect amount of time. In about three and a half hours you are told a story of a loving family ripped apart by some freak religion and the player takes it upon themselves to seek revenge. You navigate fun, thought-provoking levels, shooting and directing a bullet to rack up the most points to show off to your friends.

The game is fun, looks great and sounds even better and for $15 what more can you ask for?!