children of the sun
Screenshots don't serve the game as well as they could: this is a game in motion, even when you're standing still. The world, the sky, the AIR moves: its dark, sickly motion an ever-present backdrop to the bright, neon violence that you visit upon the world.
Children of the Sun is a sparse puzzle-shooter where you're a sniper visiting vengeance upon a cult. There's lots of them and only one of you, but you're psychic and can make the bullet do what you want to do when it's in midflight. Speed up, slow down, change direction: new ways of making your victims' lives hell appear with a steady, refreshing tempo (conveniently, at about the same tempo as they deploy new defenses.) You go from place to place in a surreal, seemingly abandoned world. When every single cultist is dead, your work is complete.
Children of the Sun took me a lot of starts and stops to complete: full time to finish was 5 hours but FELT much more than that. For a game all about over-the-top sprays of blood, cacophonous violence, and supernatural shooting, it's not game about improvisation: it's a game about planning, observation, and meticulous execution. You're not dangerous because you can improvise your way out of a jam; you're dangerous because you've studied the scene and tried it over and over and over again until you've gotten it right.
Levels rank you on your full performance (more points for precision kills, quick actions, moving targets, etc), so it makes sense that you get reset to the beginning each time. And yet even though "restarting" is usually very very quick, it's unforgiving in a way that's ultimately not quite clear: do you fail the level because the cultists run away? Or swarm your position? Hotline Miami has the same juxtaposition of superviolence and practices, precise movements, but its levels reset with a clear signal: you are dead. In Children, if you miss, you're done.
It's not a problem until it is a problem. Some levels are real, real tricky. And that's fun, but it means that I took a lot longer finishing this game than I ever imagined that I would.