There are many games that I like, some games that I love, and very few games that I am evangelical about. Games that I will always recommend to people I know who play games, games that I think about long after I put them down. Nine Sols is one such game. Part of the fun is seeing how it unfolds, how the combat constantly evolves, and how creative the encounters become as you play, so I’ll say at the start: if you’re a fan of Sekiro and Metroid-style games like Hollow Knight, you owe it to yourself to play this masterpiece as soon as possible. If you’re wondering if you should play this game, the answer is yes. If you want some more insight, keep reading.
Nine Sols is a 2D action-platformer by Red Candle Games, a Taiwanese independent video game studio most known for its well-received horror games, which makes Nine Sols a bit of a surprise. Their previous games, Detention and Devotion, were fairly grounded and well-written, with narratives that thoughtfully explore Taiwanese politics and life under Chinese rule (Devotion was censored in China amid much controversy). While the art style, genre, and focus on combat may seem out of their wheelhouse, the sharp, politically conscious writing carries over to Nine Sols beautifully. If the art style seems a little too cutesy, don’t worry, the story is anything but. It’s a surprisingly effective narrative about family, memory, and exploitation. It is much darker than you might expect from the screenshots, containing an unsettling premise, and becomes increasingly disturbing as it goes along, to the point of, occasionally, feeling like a horror game without ever fully changing tone. Red Candle Games certainly hasn’t left the horror genre behind entirely.
In Nine Sols, you play as Yi, a mouse-cat-fox creature who is very cute. Yi is one of the Ten Sols, leaders of a furry race of creatures who were tasked with saving their race from a virus through the use of a complicated technology that, crucially, requires the brains of intelligent creatures in order to run. And you guessed it, the intelligent creatures that they found inhabit Earth (the “pale blue planet”), where humans have been enslaved and essentially farmed for our brains. To keep a long story short, Yi is betrayed by the other Nine Sols and goes on a revenge quest in an attempt to write the wrongs that they have committed. With a focus on the effects of power on both the powerless and the powerful, Nine Sols’ narrative is perceptive and thoughtful about human (or mouse-cat-fox) society, filled with wonderful little weirdos and delightful little creeps in a brilliantly rendered environment.
While we begin in a traditional East Asian village among humans, Yi quickly finds his way to the Solarian facilities, which are very advanced, and give the game a cool mixture of Eastern art and mythology and science fiction Cyberpunk that the creators call “taopunk.” The result is one of the most beautiful games that I’ve played all year, with its saturated colors and gorgeous, fluid animations. Every moment of this game is a joy to behold.
It’s a joy to play as well. Metroid-style games have become a very common style for indie games and it can be difficult for one to stand out among the crowd. While many of my favorite games are in this genre, I often find myself disinterested in a lot of releases because they often feel like lesser versions of other, better games. Nine Sols stands out because of its focus on parry-heavy combat. Every encounter finds you watching closely for a slight tell; it could be light glistening off of a metallic weapon as the enemy readies an attack, it could be the clink of a weapon sheath, or it could be a guttural moan, but identifying it is always the first key. There are two kinds of enemy attacks, regular ones that can be parried, and glowing red attacks that cannot. Those must be dodged or avoided by jumping off of the enemy’s head, which has the added benefit of stunning them temporarily. Most attacks, however, are the kind that can be parried, and each parry builds a meter that allows Yi to unleash more powerful attacks.
While it feels increasingly reductive to compare every difficult game with Souls elements to a From Software game, the game’s description on its official Steam page says that this game is Sekiro-inspired, so here it feels apt. And for the record, I think that Sekiro is From’s best game, so any game that is heavily inspired by that masterpiece is exciting to me, personally. Almost nothing feels as good in a video game as an intense fight where you never get touched, not because of dodging or blocking, but because of your precise parrying. The battle becomes a dance, as you maneuver around your enemy, deflecting their attacks with precision parries which build up your own attacks, and striking at the exact perfect moment to take them out.
While it does an exhilarating job of honoring its inspirations, Nine Sols isn’t quite as tough as Sekiro. While it is difficult, with some sections of the game feeling pretty brutal, the parry window is more forgiving than in Sekiro, and the 2D perspective means that the infamous camera issues of many of From’s games are irrelevant. There are some challenging platforming sections as well, but most of the toughest ones are reserved for optional areas that contain chests and other various nice, but unnecessary upgrades.
As the world expands, so does your ability to navigate it. The upgrades constantly give you more options, not only in combat but also in traversal, which makes both combat and platforming consistently interesting. Sometimes, even in my most beloved Metroid-style games, I find the constant backtracking dull as I proceed further and further in the game and find myself lost more and more, and this is very rarely an issue in Nine Sols, as I found the maps to be pretty intuitive. Occasionally, I did find myself wandering around to figure out where to go next, but it rarely took very long, and my increasing toolbox of traversal options made it fun and interesting to travel through places that I had been before.
There are some small quality-of-life elements that many other games in the genre have that I miss in this game. I would have loved the ability to place pins on the map, and quick travel is reserved for pretty late in the game, though neither of those are terribly major factors in my enjoyment of the game. The maps are so intuitive, and there are constant ways to unlock pathways from one area to another, that I rarely thought about them.
This is one of the most elegantly designed Metroid-style games that I’ve encountered in years. Everything fits together into a near-perfect whole, but it’s the combat that stands out the strongest. Hours after I’ve put it away to do something else, I run through whichever my last encounter was in my mind, thinking about the rhythms of the fight, considering whether or not I’m maximizing my move set as well as possible, thinking about changing one maneuver or piece of gear for another, but mostly wondering when I’ll be able to get back to it and play it some more. I suspect that I’ll be thinking about Yi and his quest for a long time. It seems as though whatever Red Candle Games makes is best-in-class, regardless of genre, and I can’t wait to see what they cook up next.