‘Children Of The Sun’ review: brain-teasing shooter hits the mark

In PC puzzle-shooter Children Of The Sun, minimalism rules. Its protagonist, dubbed The Girl, is never named. You can barely make out the hazy faces of The Cult she has sworn to kill, even through the lens of her sniper. There’s no dialogue in this violent campaign of revenge, and its ultimate target, the enigmatic Leader, is also nameless. None of this is important, because The Girl has everything she needs: a gun, telekinetic powers, and a single bullet.

• READ MORE: How supernatural sniping game ‘Children Of The Sun’ survived a “shit” pitch to Devolver

This is the set-up to a simple yet brilliant premise. Across 26 levels, the goal is to murder groups of cultists with just one shot. When your bullet destroys something – be it someone’s skull, an unsuspecting bird or a car’s petrol tank – The Girl can use her psychic powers to re-angle the shot, meaning tens of kills can be chained together.

However, this is much trickier than it sounds, and Children Of The Sun is more of a puzzle game than an action-packed shooter. You’ll carefully circle an area to scope out victims and find the best angle for an opening shot, and after finally pulling the trigger, spend long moments in slow-motion, deliberating who to send the bullet to next. Miss and everything resets, which means your bullet needs to reach every target in one go.

At first, The Girl can only re-fire her shot from each target she hits. But as new abilities trickle in, it’s not long before you’re curving bullets and even ricocheting them in mid-air. Rather than making things easy, these powers are barely enough to tip the odds in your favour. Once The Cult realise they’re being hunted, they step up their game. Some hide behind armour that can only be penetrated with daring long-shots, while others have supernatural powers of their own and can deflect The Girl’s bullet with their mind.

Combine this with targets often being hundreds of meters apart or in separate rooms, and you’re forced to adopt increasingly creative solutions, threading hot death through cracked-open doors and tight corners to get the perfect kill. You might let a psychic cultist redirect a bullet so that it can fly through the window of a nearby church and hit the target praying within, or blast a passing bird for a better vantage point.

It’s a deeply compelling formula, and shares a lot in common with time-bending shooter Superhot and ultra-violent top-down game Hotline Miami. You’re always planning six kills ahead because there’s no room for short-sightedness, and it’s a thrill when everything comes together in one vicious chain. There are some phenomenal setpieces that will likely be talked about for years – like firing from a moving car to take out a convoy of speeding baddies, or defying physics to kill everyone in a sleazy motel.

Tying this all together is a supreme sense of style. Children Of The Sun looks like it’s being played through a battered VHS tape, while sickly purples and angry reds make The Girl’s story feel like it’s set within a migraine. A gigantic ‘DEAD’ will tear across your screen as soon as the last enemy stops breathing, and the plot is told entirely through surreal (often intensely violent) cutscenes between stages.

However, Children Of The Sun is arguably too good for its own good. It’s two to four hours long (two playthroughs took us six hours), which leaves you craving more. That can be drawn out by high score-chasing – this is where we casually mention holding top-ten scores on several missions’ leaderboards – and completing each level’s cryptic challenge (IE kill someone in a certain way), but it still feels a little abrupt.

By the time real challenges start appearing, you’re already close to the end, and it would have been fantastic to get more of the game’s final act, where you’re forced to use everything you’ve learned to eke out close-call slaughters. Additionally, not all of its mechanics are given enough time to shine – for example, one feature involving magical shields is only introduced in the very last level.

The upshot of this is that every mission feels utterly unique, and the credits roll long before that magic fades. We never learn The Girl’s name, or The Leader’s, and only see the briefest snippets of their backstory. The entire game can be completed in just 26 trigger-pulls, though never with a second bullet. If Children Of The Sun does anything, it proves that less can be so much more.

Children Of The Sun launches on April 9 for PC.