No Sun To Worship is a bite-sized, minimalist stealth game from solo developer Antonio Freyre. Through six stages dripping with atmosphere, you’ll hide in shadows, crawl through vents, and sneak up on guards, hopefully without being spotted. It’s a wonderful, stripped-down take on Metal Gear Solid’s excellent VR Missions, and while you can finish the game in a single sitting, I’ve been still thinking about it almost daily since I rolled credits.
The story here is more about mood and vibes than a cohesive plot. The description on Steam reads, “We painted the sky ashen gray. Burned the heavens to starve each other. Now we walk an endless cemetery of regret.” While the fact that this sounds like My Chemical Romance lyrics might be a turn off to some, I really dug the non-verbal storytelling at play throughout the missions.
The first thing about the game that stood out to me were its stellar visuals. It evokes the polygonal simplicity of the late PS1 era, while bringing some modern bells and whistles to the table. Not just the obvious in Metal Gear Solid, but Vagrant Story, Tekken 3, and Silent Hill as well, which are some of the best-looking games of that generation. The levels each have a unique identity of their own through not just the setting, but their color palette as well.
Your goal in each stage is to kill a set number of prisoners, or “Punish” them, as the game puts it. Slinking around in the shadows and assassinating people whose hands are bound and heads are covered in hoods gives a real sense of “Are we the baddies?” which I dug. And while I wasn’t able to come to any concrete conclusions on my own, I look forward to people far smarter than me diving into the game’s hidden symbolism and iconography.
Once your targets on a given map are all gone, you just have to make your way to the exit, and you’re right as rain. Initial runs through levels can last anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes, though there were a few stages that took quite a few failures before I came up with my desired route. Once I felt like I’d mastered them, I was able to blast through the campaign in about half an hour, and I wanted to keep jumping in to see how much time I could shave off. In a season overflowing with lengthy must-plays like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Starfield, there’s something wonderful about being able to digest an experience in a single sitting.
No Sun To Worship’s magic lies in its simplicity. You only have two guns – a silenced pistol, and a not-so-silenced automatic rifle. Ammo is scarce, so you have to plan your bullets carefully. Instant stealth takedowns are the way to go, but all that gets thrown out the window once an enemy spots you and all hell breaks loose. Thankfully, the game’s clean UI displays your current visibility level, as well as how much sound you’re making, meaning that you have all the tools you need to succeed in your sneakiness. If you tiptoe through shadows, you’re golden. If you stomp through a well-lit corridor or splash around in puddles, well, that’s a different story.
I got over the initial difficulty hurdle once I finally started using the environment to my advantage. You can shoot out lights to create a cover of darkness, make noise to lure guards over, and sneak around behind them to deliver a stealth kill, all of which brought to mind shades of the original Splinter Cell games in a great way. Though hostile at first, memorizing environments and patrol routes eventually reveals countless ways you can turn the levels against your enemies.
But the big unique mechanic at play here in No Sun To Worship is the ability to drain your own life in exchange for complete silence in your movements. Your health depletes rapidly while this is engaged, but knowing when to toggle it on, charge up behind an enemy, and swiftly take them down provides some amazing moments of risk-reward.
This is enhanced by your ability to vampirically pull the life force from anybody you’ve killed. You regain different amounts of health depending on the enemy types, with the prisoners completely refilling your meter. This also removes their bodies from the level, meaning other patrolling guards won’t be alerted by the corpses of their dead pals, so win-win I guess. It also further fuels the “No, seriously, are we the baddies?” vibes present throughout the entirety of the game.
A few years ago, I wrote a piece about how much I love single-sitting games like Journey, A Short Hike, and Ico. There’s a refinement in their brevity, and something refreshing in their focus on a singular goal. No Sun To Worship is another game that absolutely belongs on that list, and anybody who dug the stripped-down depiction of stealth found in the VR Missions of the original Metal Gear Solid owes it to themselves to check this one out.
