If you miss Hotline Miami, miss Superhot, or have a soft spot for Killer7, then the unique new shooter 2024, out right now, is for you. From Doom to Call of Duty, Half-Life to Grand Theft Auto, it's the most common action in all video games, a banal, emotionless input that we perform largely without thinking. You point the gun. You are firing a pistol. You kill everything on the screen. The Last of Us, Spec Ops The Line and other games pose a moral challenge to this tradition, but it almost always remains the same: in video games you kill without feeling anything. The new shooter from Cult of the Lamb and Hotline Miami publisher Devolver Digital, created by indie developer Rene Rother, is one of the most stylish and unique games of 2024, turning every bullet into an exercise in planning and delivery. Available right now, this game is a vicious and vibrant take on virtual carnage.
Children of the Sun is part puzzle, part FPS. You play as a young masked sniper whose parents died at the hands of the mysterious cult of the same name. The titular Children of the Sun have spread across a stylized, quasi-nightmare version of the Deep South. They hang out in barns, hold drinking parties and drift races on the lake, drink beer on the shore of the bay, feeding the corpses of their enemies to alligators. You, on the other hand, exist literally on the periphery. Similar to the disguised rail movement in Suda 7's Killer51, you can only move in a fixed circle around your prey, observing them from a cold distance. Once you mark each of the future corpses, a wild moment will occur.
You crouch down, take off your mask and raise the rifle to your shoulder. The first target is always the easiest, but from here on out Children of the Sun puts its own unique twist on the killing process. You will not have the opportunity to take a second shot. Instead, you need to move a single bullet from enemy to enemy, bouncing off foreheads, sternums, and shocked faces like some kind of blood-soaked jump rope.
If you hit a hard surface, the combo will be interrupted and you will start over. But environmental soft spots like car gas tanks or birds flying overhead can be used to change perspective if you can't find anything to kill the cultist. Later in the game, you'll also be able to telepathically deflect bullets or, if you successfully hit certain parts of your victim's body, reset your aim and fire again.
The result is a cerebral, sometimes mind-bending reimagining of shooting and killing patterns. Every time you aim, every time you pull the trigger, and every time you point a molten lump of lead at another squishing body, you need to think. It makes you think of a calculating, obsessive killer who seeks revenge. If you'd like to try Children of the Sun, it's available right now.
We recommend: Diablo 4 Season 4 Release Date: PTR Details and More
