Children of the Sun is one of the most disturbing games I’ve ever played. Admittedly, that sounds like a great opening line to a tabloid article about ranting about the terrible state of things, but don’t worry. I mean it as a good thing. God, this game is dark, scary, violent, horrifying, disturbing and depressing, like a nightmare creeping into your waking life. In the right sense!
Pretty fitting, Children of the Sun also nutshells like something that would set a Fox News host’s socks on fire. You play the role of a crazy, lone gunwoman, a sniper known only as “The Girl,” who aims to eliminate every member of a fractious cult by firing impossibly controlled bullets that direct, slow, and soon target her exploding heads of everyone in the sights. Imagine taking away the abuse in the camp Far away or Sniper elitetitrating them down to their purest form and then viewing them through the lens of a colossal nervous breakdown.
The girl, as I gather from the ambiguous opening sequences, has escaped a cult that caused the death of someone important to her. Therefore, she is on a mission to kill everyone involved, using magic bullets. Each level of the game begins with the girl exploring an area from the edge, where you can walk in an arc around the edge by moving your mouse left or right. Left-click and you’ll be looking at your scope, where you can zoom in and highlight any visible enemies with a middle click. Far away-Style. Once you’ve found them all and picked the perfect angle, line up and fire.
However, you only fire once, no matter how many enemies you have to take out. Because in Children of the Sun, Your bullet can redirect after a successful hit. When you splatter a head, you can now choose a new direction to go in, crack open a new skull, and string together all the slo-mo kills in a level with a single zigzag bullet. If you miss someone, it’s a failure and you start the level over (though thankfully all the marked enemies are still highlighted).
As you progress, your supernatural firearms skills develop, initially allowing you to further slow time and slightly reorient the trajectory of your bullet. This allows you to zero in on moving targets or even steer around a corner or through a window to reach a blocked enemy. However, if you want to completely redirect your bullet mid-flight, you’ll need to go deeper and gain the more powerful ability by hitting enough highlighted areas on the cult members’ bodies.
An incredibly good time
Aesthetically, the game I remembered most was the one from 2016 knocker. The self-described “rhythm-violence” game may have almost nothing in common with it mechanically Children of the Sunbut both games have the same oppressive awfulness through their combination of muddy blues and purples Brown note-Adjacent sound effects and scores. Both make me feel like I’m playing 30 feet underwater with a migraine. Both are absolutely brilliant.
Children of the SunHere too, art does a lot of work. A sort of PS1 vibe gives the game itself an atmospheric horror that contrasts with the over-saturated Saturday morning cartoons gone bad in the cutscenes, always accompanied by a deafening, feedback-laden guitar roar. It’s a game that takes every opportunity to make you feel uncomfortable, which I think is perhaps crucial given the horrific nature of what you’re doing. (Are the people she kills other victims of the cult? Do they deserve her wrath? Should she perhaps save them?) When bullets hit, bodies are ragged in super slow motion, pixelated blood pours out, faces contort in horror, and others nearby try – unsuccessfully – to escape.
However, it is the acoustic area where the game impresses the most. When you move your character in her bow, she makes these plucked bass sounds. The faster she moves, the higher the note the distorted Godspeed You! give a crazy rhythm. Black, wailing Emperor-style guitar strings. Switch to aim mode and an ominous, crashing pair of drum beats join the score, and as the bullet is fired there’s a guttural roar, a Lynchian, booming, all-consuming awfulness.
Tidy up your bedroom
The game is undoubtedly provocative, sometimes even childish. There’s a level where our emo-haired protagonist sits on a toilet and cleans her rifle. Instead of the usual bullet-directing antics, we instead play an 80s-style arcade game called “I Just Killed A Man Now I’m Horny,” which involves clumsily pushing an avatar’s head through a box Navigate the maze, collect balls and avoid enemy heads. Uh, okay. I mean, the back of her jacket says “NO PEACE.” These are peculiarly sophomore tones compared to what otherwise feels so sophisticated and elegant.
When you complete a level, you’re shown a top view of the path your bullet took, and then you’re scored based on the time taken and the “shots” used (which means redirects, since it’s technically one shot). one after another) evaluates nature), hits heads and so on. You’ll also see how that score compares to all other players, so you can complain that 691 people could possibly have found a better, more efficient route than you just did. It’s this rating that’s supposed to motivate you to go back to previous levels and improve your shots, but honestly, I’ve never fully understood what it’s looking for and how to increase these numbers – the ability to increase another player’s overhead height see This path would be a nice addition and would certainly give me reason to see if I can learn and improve.
The 26 levels will take quite a bit of time. Later, in the final handful, the complexity increases to the point where it’s less about refining the approach and more about a complicated puzzle, trying to figure out possible routes that don’t just take out every guard can, but also capture enough specific target hotspots to get additional bullet deflections, and also have enough distance to have enough speed for the armored guards. It’s probably fair to say that this is taking too long to get difficult and that everything is happening too close to the end. Too soon, of course, and I would have complained that it was alienating so they could never win.
Children of the Sun is an impressive, stirring, fantastic creation. It’s everything your mother wanted video games to be, in the best possible way. And it does so with an orchestrated acoustic attack that makes it best in class. It completely gripped me and undeniably disturbed me.
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