Through dense digital underbrush and up sloping inclines, each quick-fire level within Children of the Sun begins on foot, as The Girl, its unnamed protagonist, runs in a distant arc around her cultist prey. Long hair covering her face, gun slung across her back, head turned down to the dirt – the sense is less of someone scoping their targets, and more that they’re simply sensing the right place to finally take their shot.
Of course, it’s you in control – sending The Girl left or right along a preset path as you scan the bright shapes in the distance: glowing golden figures amidst dark surroundings, highlighted as if by some sort of sixth sense. Does The Girl have some kind of special powers? Were the cult in question, the Children of the Sun, anything to do with that? The only information you’re given on her backstory is that she was once one of their number – willing or not is unclear – before becoming hellbent on their destruction.
Once you have picked The Girl’s position, each level then transitions to its main event: trigger pulled, the bullet fires via Sniper Elite-style slow-motion tracking shot through the air – barrelling towards its first target. Cue blood spurts, and then – on you go, again as if by magic, with a chance now to suddenly change the bullet’s angle to take down a second cultist, and then a third, and a fourth… But where are they all? Regardless of where you take that original shot, each level in Children of the Sun is a miniature maze for you to navigate in bullet time. Around corners, through windows into buildings, hiding in the trees. Get your path right, and no one is safe.
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