Puzzle shooters have rarely missed the mark on being creative and thinking outside the box. The game series to define the genre was Portal. But the concept of first-person puzzlers has been growing since games like Talos Principle and Outer Wilds have come about. Children of the Sun felt like great parts of these games, done with deadly, tactful creativity.
Devolver Digital (Cult of the Lamb, Inscryption) and René Rother debuted the grunge and high-octane world of Children of the Sun to life. It revolves around an unnamed cult just called The Cult, a girl named The Girl, and the main enemy named The Leader—simple enough. The player controls The Girl, who will do anything to shoot and kill The Leader and The Cult that slighted her. The more levels you progress, the more you learn about the dark truth about this mysterious order and the atrocities committed by them in the name of their master.
The story is as gritty as the other aspects of the game, such as the music and art style. The story was left to be interpretative because there was no dialogue or words. It was really the quick 5 to 10-second intros for some levels that showed the revenge story unfold. The heavy grunge music added to the dark vibes of the game, but also added some gravitas to the revenge plot. The colour palette of the game was mainly purple and yellow, one of my favourite colour combinations—so there may be some bias there!
Children of the Sun is a tactical third-person puzzle shooter where the player controls one bullet per level, guiding it through increasingly complex and challenging levels to kill cultists, trigger traps, and reshape the environment. Every shot is important, as well as the angle and choices of who to shoot first. Like the movie Wanted, you can curve the bullet—except you become the bullet in this case.
“For players who love puzzles, Children of the Sun has major replayability and competitiveness.”
The versatility in gameplay was what stood out to me the most from this game after playing it. You only have a single bullet to complete each level, but you can re-aim on impact, curve around obstacles, accelerate to break through armour, and hit critical weak points to build up ways to get different shot angles.
I really liked the natural progression through the levels of learning these new abilities. I felt like the basics were easy to grasp, making it easy to use newly introduced abilities as the story progresses. It was a nice change of pace when new enemy types were also introduced. This was another layer of difficulty to maneuver around.
Like many games, there were regular enemies, enemies with extra armour, enemies with shields, enemies that moved around, and enemies with a few extra powers. Some levels also have a bit of a twist on the gameplay!
“Children of the Sun is a tactical third-person puzzle shooter where the player controls one bullet per level, guiding it through increasingly complex and challenging levels…”
For players who love puzzles, Children of the Sun has major replayability and competitiveness. There are multiple solutions to each level, encouraging creativity and experimentation with a satisfying scoring system that rewards accuracy and efficiency. Then, you can check the online leaderboards to see how you stack up against your friends and the rest of the world.
Another layer of replayability is that certain levels have special named bonus objectives in white text beneath the title card of the level. This can be good for completionists to test their skills. All of the scoring is justified if you look at the game manual. The main scoring criteria consisted of distance, time spent in a level, body parts (yes, there is a nut shot bonus!), explosion kills, multi kill, score multiplier, time spent aiming down sights, and the enemy type. The scoring reminded me of playing the Sniper Elite games a lot.
I hope the developers expand on the story or have a way to implement more levels and challenges. I think it would be cool if the game had a mode to create your own maps and place enemies where the player wants—sort of like how the Halo games have the Forge or Fortnite’s Creative Mode.
The whole story can take about four to six hours to complete if you are just trying to get through it. I got through it in about five hours, and that was me re-trying some of the levels. But the game left a lot to replay through and climb up the leaderboards. This was a great puzzle-shooter experience that I never would have thought I would love. It has the possibility to expand its puzzles and maybe its story to a certain extent. I am curious to see if René Rother will do that and if they will create other games in the future.
