No such thing as a magic bullet? Devolver disagrees
The first time you lay eyes on Children Of The Sun is something of a Rorschach test. Peering through the scope of the provided rifle, marking guards and tracing the patterns of their patrols, you might identify the outline of a Hitman, Sniper Elite or Far Cry. The stark lighting and lurid colours could equally remind you of Superhot, Killer7 or ’70s giallo movies. But after a couple of hours with it, we find ourselves settling on a rather more unexpected resemblance: to billiards, snooker or pool.
The movement of your avatar – a young woman who has escaped a cult, armed with the hunting skills and telekinetic powers it bestowed upon her – is fixed to a track, so that she circles each outpost much as you might a baize-topped table. After picking a position, you have a single shot to clear it of cultists, often half a dozen or more. Which would be impossible, of course, if not for the aforementioned psychic abilities: every time your bullet connects with a valid target you get to redirect it, drawing a straight line to your next target. Success means playing the angles in familiar fashion, ricocheting between craniums and petrol tanks rather than balls and cushions, and with extra heapings of style.
Your avatar circles each outpost much as you might a baize-topped table
Developer René Rother formerly served as lead 3D artist on El Hijo, Honig Studios’ handsome, soft-edged cartoon Western. Here, working alone, Rother flirts with ugliness, filtering simple geometry through what looks like a ’00s Photoshop sharpen effect. Somehow, it works. Bodies burn bright yellow under the moonlight. Each shot zooms towards them in a tight bullet’seye view, the soundtrack rattling like an industrial process. When a shot lands, it’s accompanied by a cymbal clash every bit as satisfying as the clack of billiard balls colliding.
Pleasing as this is when everything aligns, however, finding the perfect shot can feel arbitrary. From your initial recon position, you can only guess at the topography of potential obstacles – which is the source of the game’s friction, of course, but it is all too easy to snooker yourself. Hitting restart for the dozenth time in five minutes, we recognise the shape of Hotline Miami (still the ur-Devolver game, it seems). But where failure in that game depended on a multitude of factors, from bad plans to botched reflexes, here it ultimately comes down to the spot you chose along that lazy-Susan circuit of the level’s edge.
At least, initially. Over time, the game folds in other complications – pickup-truckriding cultists who pull doughnuts in the mud, trains that rattle past so that you must time shots with the occasional boxcar door left flapping open – and, to counter them,
