Of all the games I’ve played this year, Children of the Sun is far and away the most hostile. This trippy shooter follows The Girl, a survivor of The Cult’s abuses, as she takes her revenge on them and The Leader. Yes, those terms are all capitalized properly, Children of the Sun sees fit to give these characters the proper noun treatment, as if to build authoritative institutions out of them while keeping each vague enough for the player to substitute any real name and person into the game’s simplistic analog for institutional violence. The Girl could be any number of survivors who have unfortunately been at the behest of many a Cult and/or Leader.
Children of the Sun then goes the extra mile by giving her the tools to bring the fight to the Cult and exact her vengeance on the Leader for putting her through hell. It arms The Girl with a rifle and the power to direct her bullets with her mind. From then on, it’s hunting season as she picks apart the Cult one headshot, explosive barrel, and flame-touched bullet at a time. Children of the Sun is furious and fantastic, and it can be yours for just about $10 on Steam.
Children of the Sun has a single real mechanic: sniping. As The Girl enters each of the game’s levels, which are often painted in harsh but luminescent purples and reds, she moves at the whim of your mouse, allowing you to tactically position her. After you find the right perch, she aims down her scope and can make out the Cult’s grunts by their bright yellow glows, at which point you can tear them a new one. Every mission, she is effectively granted one bullet with which to take out several targets, whose positions can be scouted ahead of time and marked.
The Girl only manages to be so economical about her firepower thanks to the use of her telekinetic abilities, which grow to include speeding up the bullet to pierce through armor and bending its trajectory. But to begin with, you will only be able to redirect the bullet upon immediately killing an enemy. That’s right, the brain matter will still be flying through the air as Children of the Sun hands you control of the round and asks whose skull you want to empty next or what gas tank you want to explode.
In this sense, it’s more of a puzzle game than it is a straightforward shooter. It pays to be precise and carry out these acts of vengeance as quickly as possible, for example, because every kill is scored. Levels come with additional optional challenges, encouraging the use of other features, such as ravens and marine life that can be killed to gain a vantage point or an unexpected angle on targets. Specific body parts on certain enemies will glow bright white, and hitting these points grants you psychic charges that can be used to eventually slow down time and redirect the bullet completely. At the end of each level, a map will show the trajectory of the bullet and rank you on a leaderboard, issuing a challenge to step up your game and get even grislier revenge.
Children of the Sun’s missions start simple enough, but eventually become intimidating and psychedelic murder puzzles. At first, some enemies may be sitting around a small campfire they’ve erected in the woods, but later levels will take place across two sides of a small town’s main thoroughfare, where your bullets will bounce between the heads of enemies at different elevations in different buildings on varying ends of the street. Two of my favorite missions are also two of the game’s most ambitious (and frustrating) bits—one level set in the middle of a car chase and another set across an imposing apartment block—but when it all comes together, Children of the Sun is unparalleled in its blistering and cathartic violence. Finally, the ugly, cinematic, and tightly directed revenge thriller that games have deserved.
Children of the Sun is a mood, not least of all because of its substantive use of dark hues to paint an utterly gnarly picture. Through and through, it is just raw and unabashed in its condemnation of abuse and The Girl’s subsequent punishment of the wicked. It is ever so slightly longer than it needs to be, and may prove a bit uncomfortable in tone and style for some, but for $10 you’re getting one of the boldest titles of the year and you should be tripping over yourself to get to it.