Children of the Sun review: unnerving shooter is the feel-bad game of the year

digitaltrends.com:

Children of the Sun Score Details DT Recommended Product Pros

• Ingenious puzzle-shooting mechanic
• Haunting visual style
• Unnerving sound design

• Ends as it gets going
• Tired cultist story

In Children of the Sun’s pitch-black world, obsession is an all-consuming vortex that baptizes its victims in blood. It swallows normal people and spits out religious fanatics who believe they need to kill for their god. It transforms a girl into a gun-toting murderer who won’t stop shooting until she’s put a bullet in every single one of those cultists in the name of revenge. There are no righteous crusades here, only bodies.

That’s the tension at play in the latest game from publisher Devolver Digital and developer René Rother. Children of the Sun is a hyper-gritty tone piece with a sickly satisfying sniping mechanic at its heart. Though it explores ideas about video game violence that are well-trodden in 2024, the short puzzle-shooter hybrid is effectively unnerving. The violence is uncomfortable, the harsh soundscape is overwhelming, the visuals are creepy. And yet, I’m drawn to the trigger level after level, desperate to find nirvana in a pile of corpses.

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Symphony of blood

When the story begins, I take on the role of a mysterious sniper only known as The Girl. Some quick motion comic cutscenes tease out a mysterious story about a nefarious religious cult dubbed the Children of the Sun, which The Girl has very good reason to hate. She sets out on a path of revenge, vowing to wipe out derelict complexes filled with zealots en route to the group’s leader. That journey happens over around 26 blood-soaked shooting galleries that mount in complexity.

But Children of the Sun is far from a traditional shooter. At the start of each level, I sit at the outskirts of a cultist