In any other universe, I would balk at Nine Sols’ difficulty. Yet, I gave it a chance, and it more than rewarded me for giving it a moment of my time. Over 20 hours later, I came out of it bruised, battered, and wanting more Taopunk goodness.
When I was younger, I was very interested in Eastern religions despite my Orthodox Christian upbringing. Things like Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, and Taoism all piqued my interests in reassessing the world and what it meant to survive in a world of strife. Perhaps this stemmed from my familiarity and comfort with the notion of death, a conversation topic my now late father and I regularly discussed in detail over meals. We knew it was coming, so why bother focusing on the after? Focus on the now. Be a good person. Live in the moment.
I wasn’t interested in explaining the world through polytheistic or monotheistic lenses, attempting to assign blame to someone or somethings when I was dissatisfied. I found comfort in connecting with my world (not just gaming) and appreciating the simplicity of something like a butterfly or the wind blowing through the heat of Los Angeles.
I turned to books like The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet (both excellently written allegories from Benjamin Hoff) for an understanding of Taoism. From these works, I learned about how my own humanity got in the way of connecting with the Tao (natural way of the universe and simple existence). My struggles with being open to experience stemmed from me preferring a rigidness to my life in the form of schedules, timetables, and routines.
I digress. My point here is that I appreciated knowing more about the world from multiple philosophical aspects, Taoism included. It’s not often where I see games utilize deep connections to religious thematic that not only accurately utilize them but connect with them in creative fashions beyond simply recreating Eastern aesthetic tropes. When I came across Red Candle Games’ Nine Sols, it was refreshing to see something that effortlessly portrayed Taoism in a way that I have hardly seen in the gaming medium.
It feels like Nine Sols came out of nowhere. I remember seeing Red Candle Games announcing Nine Sols in 2021 and its crowdfunding campaign in 2022, but I didn’t expect to see it manifest in 2024 as an aesthetically remarkable and powerful 2D metroidvania.
Nine Sols is described by Red Candle Games as a lore rich, hand-drawn 2D action-platformer featuring Sekiro-inspired deflection focused combat. Featuring “Taopunk” art and thematics, Nine Sols explores an Asian fantasy-inspired world involving revenge and mystery. As Yi, a cat samurai in a bright yellow kimono, I was to slay the Nine Sols and figure out the fate of the world around me.
Wait a minute, Taopunk? What the hell is that? Think of Taopunk as a hybrid thematic incorporating cyberpunk futurism with traditional East-Asian elements. Imagine data centers that manifest as towering pagodas and colored e-ink screens full of kanji that wipe themselves clean when you walk away. Enemies are robotic samurai with glowing red swords. It’s quite the unique thematic that blends two aesthetics that are quite popular amongst players. As a result, Nine Sols presents itself in a uniquely colorful fashion, leaning hard into futurism with Eastern blends. It’s stunning.
If you’re familiar with my prior reviews, you’re probably aware of my hesitancy with souls games. The idea of “just dodging” enemies who can kill me in one hit doesn’t add up to an enjoyable gameplay experience. Yet, I enjoyed Sifu and Aeterna Noctis, both of which are grueling combat-forward games that forced me to reconcile with the notion of dying, retracing my steps, potentially dying again, and facing ridiculously powerful bosses.
I died a lot in Nine Sols. A lot a lot. My first few hours of Nine Sols were spent agonizing over what I thought was unfair enemies, cheap attacks, and doing what I thought was the only way to survive: Dodging. As it turns out, dodging wasn’t always the play. In fact, only 10% of my defensive maneuvers should have been dodging. The other 90% I should have been utilizing from the start was parrying. Simply timing a parry could temporarily disarm an opponent, letting me follow up with a Talisman explosion or some additional melee attacks. Once I had the parrying down (which took far less time than I had imagined it would have taken), suddenly Nine Sols’ combat opened up while its difficulty became significantly easier to manage.
The parry mechanic is Nine Sols’ bread and butter, pivoting combat away from mindless melee strikes and pushing it toward a more fluid stream of attacks. In many ways, it felt eerily similar to Sifu’s combat manifesting in a 2D plane. A robotic samurai would sparkle, indicating that a deflectable attack was incoming. When I timed a parry correctly, I would dash through the enemy and plant a Talisman on them that would explode. I loved how the combat worked because of how I could inch closer to old-school kung-fu and ninja tropes. When a game’s combat makes the player feel like they’re powerful and good at something (in this case, deflecting and attacking like a seasoned fighter), it helps fulfill a power fantasy. Why dodge when your character is built to parry and withstand attacks?
Nine Sols’ difficulty steadily ramped up as I obtained staple metroidvania traversal mechanics, like air dodge and double jump. Battles would increase in length while bosses would enact larger chains of attacks with increasing variance. By the end game, a single wave of attacks would involve me parrying three times in a row, jumping up to parry again, air dodge, parry, and then planting a talisman charge on their body.
Whether or not Nine Sols is to be considered “lore-rich” is up for debate. I’ve taken a look at how it’s been described in promotional materials as well as from other players, and I just don’t see it. The drip-feed approach to getting me invested in Yi’s journey doesn’t pass the sniff test in the game being heavy with lore. When I think of lore-rich games, I think of games that bring me along for the ride in fleshing out exposition and the context in which the protagonist’s journey exists. When mystique is utilized too heavily, it takes away the power of the player’s actions and prevents emotional investment in the protagonist along with the protagonist’s compatriots.
I didn’t really get the opportunity to see a fleshed-out universe with deep backstory in Nine Sols, at least until about 16-or-so hours in. Each biome had small lore-related secrets scattered about that hinted at each segment of New Kunlun’s purpose, but there was a nagging feeling that I couldn’t shake. Why was I in New Kunlun to begin with? What exactly is New Kunlun? Most importantly – who exactly is Yi supposed to be, and why is he so important? All of these questions end up getting answered by the final boss in a lore-dump fashion akin to Kojima’s famous several-hour-long endgame cutscenes, but the fact remains that Nine Sols had some lore-pacing issues. It kept its worldbuilding cards too close to the chest for most of the game.
After boss battles, I would be shown a manga-inspired cutscene along with a brief moment where I could surmise the backstory and potential motives of who I had just slain. The few instances where the Sols would mock me and/or attempt to dissuade me from proceeding further gave me the impression that these enemies were selfish beings. Yet after they were slain, a quick walk through their soulscape (a virtual reality environment) showed me each boss’ true colors, some of them being tragic beyond all belief.
By Nine Sols’ end, I no longer had questions about where or what Yi was. Instead, I was asking questions about whether or not the journey was justified. The proverbs that were told to me through the Taoist lens throughout the story ended up making me wonder if my path of vengeance had made me any better than those I had slain. Was I a hero on the side of justice, or did my actions stain my motives to the point of being a demon in cherubic clothing?
Perhaps this is what Red Candle games meant by Nine Sols being lore-rich. A hero’s journey that results in introspection is powerful, pulling at the heartstrings and encouraging me to ask questions about my role in the universe. The characters I had bonded with along my journey softened my heart bit by bit, but I wasn’t invested in the universe where I was bound. Instead, it felt like Nine Sols created a world that slowly begged me to reconsider what it meant to live in harmony and better myself after facing unjust actions.
To that end, I don’t consider Nine Sols to be lore-rich. I said this before, and I want to drive this point home before I continue. I consider Nine Sols to be doctrine-rich, letting me as a player answer real-world questions that are often asked during RPGs. I didn’t have RPG-choices, mind you, but I was often given chances to reflect on my actions and the events unfolding around my path of destruction. This speaks to Nine Sols’ power as a storytelling medium. Should you get to its conclusion, you may experience moments of introspection like I did, albeit with a set of questions only you are able to answer.
My attention was not on Nine Sols’ story until the end. Instead, I wanted to just explore and fight, seeing whatever I could see before my inevitable death. I rarely asked myself questions like “I wonder why Lady Ethereal uploaded her consciousness to a soulscape?” Instead, I was more interested in exploring the environments so I could marvel at Nine Sols’ beautifully drawn world and find secret upgrades in its gigantic rooms.
Rather than piecemeal hallways and room segments, each of Nine Sols’ biomes are comprised of two or three gargantuan multi-tier levels with a single save point. Secret hallways and passages were often pushed into outskirts and locked behind doors that required me to unlock them by defeating robotic statues at opposite ends of the room. This meant that exploration was a centralized affair and encouraged me to explore as much as I could in a single room before proceeding to the next.
This type of level design makes the map look smaller than it ended up being, and I appreciated this approach. Coming out of TEVI (which often broke up biomes into smaller segments), it felt like I had more freedom to explore and utilize spaces for combat. Cramped combat is not fun – luckily, it’s not a problem here.
I’m usually critical of metroidvanias with middling platforming, or at least those that miss out on opportunities to take advantage of 2D spaces with complex traversal. Nine Sols doesn’t go all out in complex platforming like Aeterna Noctis. Instead, the few traversal segments that proved challenging ended up rewarding me for going off the beaten path in the form of permanent health upgrades and talismans I could equip Yi with to give him an edge in the form of a few more invincibility frames or the ability to gather more amounts of currency. I admittedly wanted something uber difficult like Hollow Knight’s White Palace, but I didn’t get it. Instead, Nine Sols’ combat kept me focused on timing and survival.
I’m willing to forgive Nine Sols in falling a bit short in testing my platforming chops seeing as it tested my combat chops all the while presenting its world in a gorgeous way. The relatively simplistic platforming (for most of the game) ended up being one of the few drawbacks of Nine Sols. Is it worth critiquing? Absolutely. Players should have opportunities (like postgame segments or optional objectives that yield something rewarding) to flex their platforming chops in an already challenging game.
Looking forward, there are three things I want from Nine Sols and Red Candle Games. First, Nine Sols deserves to come to console players. I am aware that this is already in progress, but I want to emphasize that Nine Sols on the PS5, XB, and Switch would challenge a larger swath of players who enjoy Hollow Knight and want something similar. Second, boss rush mode. Some of the best moments I spent in Nine Sols involved me slaying the Sols and optional secret bosses (no spoilers – it’s worth exploring to find them). The bosses were appropriately challenging and almost always featured attack patterns that made parrying-based combat fun. Finally, and most importantly, I want another Taopunk entry set in the Nine Sols universe. Regardless of ending, there’s a degree of uncertainty related to Yi and his compatriots’ fates, and I would love to see further exploration in this universe to give players an opportunity to revisit and potentially grow closer to this IP.
Before I wrap things up, I want to emphasize that Nine Sols is difficult but fair. Once you are able to master deflecting, the game opens up in ways that few other games successfully accomplish. That said, if the game is still too difficult (which is totally okay, by the way), I recommend that you turn the difficulty down just to get to the end. I never turned down the difficulty during my playthrough only because I was able to get to the end after enough patience.
In any other universe, I would balk at Nine Sols’ difficulty. Yet, I gave it a chance, and it more than rewarded me for giving it a moment of my time. Over 20 hours later, I came out of it bruised, battered, and wanting more Taopunk goodness.
