I like simple games if they have something cool about them. Could be a nice core gameplay idea, or interesting style or story. Even before the proper rise of indie games, there were super low budget PC and console games. Series like “Simple” from D3 Publisher or the “SuperLite” from Success even gave birth to niche but popular franchises, most notable being Earth Defense Force. When I first saw Children of the Sun, I thought of such games and was hoping that it could have that “something cool”, whatever it is. But after the quite short playthrough of the title and just one day passing, I’m already struggling to remember the game.
At its most basic, Children of the Sun is a puzzle/sniping simulator. While you can move around the target area on a rail left or right, it’s there to let you analyze the location and choose the position for the shot. Once you shoot, you have to kill every target on the map using that one bullet you shot or you fail. How? Well, every time the bullet hits a target, it stops and lets you aim at something else, while the rest of the world is moving at extremely slow speed. So your job is to figure out the most optimal way to ricochet from one valid target to the next in one go, while eventually a couple of additional mechanics and concepts get introduced. Oh and while also attempting to complete level challenges that are hinted in the subtitle of the level.
It’s a very neat concept and I do believe that there can be a game built entirely around it, but Children of the Sun ain’t it. The most “difficult” levels tend to be that way because the game might intentionally obfuscate information from you or require you to wait. It feels artificial, not as a fun extension or evolution of the base idea, but something stuck on top of it just so you spend more time in the game. Same goes for the few levels that work differently and include weird gimmicks. It all looks clearly inspired by works of Suda51 (there’s even a hotel called NMH in the game), but has less style and substance then the games of his people actually like.
By the time I was finishing this incredibly short game, I was already forgetting it. There are not that many bad levels or moments, although the very last cutscene of the game bugged out for me, but there’s just… nothing outside of the neat base concept. Perhaps, you might be interested in playing it just for novelty sake, but I doubt you’d care much about it after it’s completed. If you even bother to complete it at all.