On Monday, indie dev Kawamura Ayumi released her first mobile adventure game, Son of the Sun, which takes players on a quest to raise a sun god who will create and rule a new planet that reflects his personality. Decisions you make as the boy’s guardian and teacher determine how his character develops and thus, the kind of planet he will reign over. While Son of a Sun has some limiting factors that give it a shelf life of only a couple hours, it exudes charm and potential for growth that’s impossible to overlook.
Son of the Sun Gameplay Overview
The game opens as you, an unnamed servant of a god, are charged with raising his young son. Part nanny, part teacher, you spend your days with the tiny boy teaching him and helping him evolve from a small bouncing energy blob in the nursery to his highest form as a sun god. As the boy explores his environment, certain objects in the room will have exclamation points appear above them. If you tap on these, a situation unfolds and you are given a couple of ways you can respond. Your response will shape the boy’s personality, either raising or lowering one of five key character traits: Positivity, Obedience, Vigor, Individuality and Sociability. You won’t know which character traits will be affected until you make your choice, but the game does incorporate a stats screen where you can check how the boy’s personality is developing over time.
Each time you make a decision, a shower of glowing orbs will rain down from the top of the screen, which you will swipe to collect. When you gather enough of these orbs, you will use them to evolve the boy to his next form. After the boy’s first evolution, several other locations are unlocked, allowing you to encounter more character-building scenarios to progress towards the boy’s next evolution. At the final stage of the game, when the boy reaches sun god status, you get to see the product of your labor as a new planet is formed in the likeness of your little sun god. The initial adventure is now over, but all stats, achievements and other related data are saved. You then have the choice to begin again, making different choices and hopefully producing a new sun god with a different planet.
The whole concept of shaping different sun gods with their own unique planets really appealed to me and seemed like a perfect model for a game that could be quite expansive. Unfortunately, Son of the Sun lacks sufficient depth to make it something players will return to again and again. Though the game includes five different locations, each has only four or five different scenarios to encounter, each offering only two ways to respond. Creating a sun god requires enough time and orb gathering that you will exhaust every scenario and most of their choices by the time he reaches his final evolution. Though I was interested in unlocking all the different planets in the game, the limited scenarios make the gameplay dull after the first time, so I only managed to unlock two of the five planets. If some time were put into expanding the game’s locations, scenarios, and choices, it could gain a lot of long-term players.
In addition to its potential for expansion, Son of the Sun also incorporates fun elements like story easter eggs you could unlock by tapping on black crows or crow feathers that appear in the scenery from time to time. There are also achievement screens that show what percentage of available choices you’ve unlocked, scenarios you’ve encountered and forms your sun god has evolved to along the way. Though the locations are limited, the pixel art for each is warm and vibrant, producing some truly charming scenes.
In a nutshell, Son of the Sun checks all the boxes a good adventure game should possess, but it lacks the depth needed to give it wings. Since this is the developer’s first game, my hope is that she will continue to expand and improve it over time.
If you want to give Son of the Sun a try, it is available now for free to download on the Apple App and Google Play Store.
