Kill whole camps of cultists with a single bullet in this psychic and psychedelic puzzle shooter

GamesPuzzleKill whole camps of cultists with a single bullet in this psychic and psychedelic puzzle shooterWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: René Rother)

The masked protagonist of Children of the Sun telekinetically floating a bullet in her hand.

The problem with the phrase “it’s like [thing] on acid!” becoming such a lame cliché is that sometimes things really are like other things on acid. The newly announcedChildren of the Sun, from publisher Devolver, is a dark and hallucinatory tale of a disturbed sniper taking revenge on a backwoods cult, and… well, basically it’s like playing Superhot while having a bad trip.

Each level starts with you on the outskirts of a gathering of the cult—whether one of its camps, a village it’s ransacking, a crime scene it’s covering up, or worse. You can move around the edges of the scene, essentially on a track, and survey it with your rifle scope to tag enemies and important objects. Once you’ve got a strategy figured out, you aim and fire—and you have to clear the entire level of enemies with that one bullet.

This is where having disturbing psychokinetic powers comes in handy. Whenever the bullet hits a person (in a shower of murky gore), or a car’s fuel cap (causing a crackling explosion of chunky pixels), time slows to a crawl and you’re able to choose a new trajectory for the bullet. As it flies to its next target, you can even curve it a little bit to get round obstacles. The result is a sort of grim join-the-dots puzzle, as you find the perfect path between targets that prevents your bullet ever being stuck somewhere where it’s blocked from redirecting into another skull.

(Image credit: René Rother)

A group of cultists about to be struck by a bullet in Children of the Sun.

It’s the world as she sees it, not as it is, and that gets you subtly questioning how reliable her point-of-view on her bloody mission even is. On the level select screen, her masked face jerkily follows the movements of your mouse. She feels like a puppet with half its strings cut, and it’s really genuinely unsettling directing her along her hyperviolent path.

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It’s very possible, however, that more depth is revealed further on than I’ve been able to play, and even if not it’s a game so dripping with style that you can’t be too put out if its formula isn’t quite watertight. It’s the kind of game you really need to see in motion, not just in screenshots. Convenient, then, thatthere’s a demo available now on Steam.

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