videogameblog

When I'm looking for a new puzzle game I usually look for games that stand out mechanically; Storyteller, Humanity and Catherine are good examples. They put a spin on concepts that aren't commonly 'puzzleified'. Children of the Sun got my attention in the same way; the puzzles being centered around shooting and bullet pathing seemed like a unique concept.

I played this game a few months ago so I don't really remember specific puzzles. I found some of the mechanics pretty frustrating, especially the guys with armor or something? You'd have to get your bullet a certain distance away from them and it was hard to judge what the distance would be. You can tell mechanics like this are introduced to keep gameplay fresh and shifting, but you can tell they probably struggled to do so because of the binary-ness of playing from the perspective of a bullet. This binary-ness is surprisingly absent in actual gameplay. There was alot of the later levels where I was unsure how to actually beat it, and felt like I was glitching the level to complete it. The final level especially was terrible, I probably spent like an hour trying to beat it. It wasn't fun at all, it requires you to kill like 30 enemies in a certain order and the lack of instantaneousness to the movement of the bullet causes you to lose 5 minutes of progress if you mess up even slightly. The stand-out mechanics are the ones that manipulate your trajectory; they encourage you to get creative with how you move around. Bodies become conduits because of mechanics like this - you shoot birds out of the sky for no reason other than to get a vantage point to reach someone else to kill. These mechanics thematically align with the grungy, loud, nihilistic aesthetics and demonstrates the disregard the player character has for life.

Children of the Sun's aesthetics are extremely distinct. The chaotic UI, paired with the loud, indecipherable storyline emphasise the rage felt by your character. The lighting is also surprisingly good; you massacre cultists basking under a golden sun. If anything from this game is going to stick in my memory it's undoubtably going to be the visuals. I had no idea what was going on in the story line but I got the overall idea that the player character really wants to kill these cultists. I didn't really mind because the art was awesome regardless.

Drawing me in with it's unique mechanics, Children of the Sun definitely delivered on providing a stand-out experience but ultimately struggled to create any satisfying or head-scratching puzzles. It's visually unique and memorable, drawing clear inspirations from games like Killer7 to form an aesthetic of anger and revenge, expressing this through its visuals, audio and character designs. Paired with some beautiful rural levels with great lighting it manages to produce an extremely visually distinct experience. Pick this up if you like more out-there visuals or if you just really really like any form of puzzle you can get your hands on.