Gosh, that’s quite a bold claim, isn’t it? Am I seriously arguing this game can follow Shadow of the Erdtree and make the eternal wait for Hollow Knight: Silksong bearable? Absolutely. At time of writing, I’m 25 hours in and yet to finish Nine Sols. But unless it ends with my PC exploding, this will likely be my game of the year. Even if that does happen, I’ll probably still recommend it.
Nine Sols is a soulslike metroidvania that… wait, wait, come back! Yes, half the 2D games out there fall into that genre these days, but this one stands out by taking its influence from Sekiro, the least idea-plundered of FromSoftware’s games. It's all about nailing different types of parry, including doing it in mid-air. Too stubborn to learn to parry properly? You'll need to crank the difficulty right down, because Nine Sols’ block-or-be-broken combat is just as pleasingly unrelenting as its main inspiration.
The most obvious difference from Sekiro is that it’s 2D, and what it lacks for in a third dimension it makes up for by being one of the most beautiful 2D games I’ve ever played. Gorgeous animation is a spectacular treat for the eyeballs one moment, and absolutely gut-wrenching the next when the game starts, well, wrenching out guts. It actually starts quite cuddly with an adorable young boy walking you through the opening village to their annual ritual. A ritual which involves a machine decapitating several villagers.
You play as Yi, a feline-looking swordsman with more skeletons in his closet than there are soulslikes on Steam. After a brief prologue in the human village, Yi decides to interrupt the decapitation-ritual (er, after two people have already gone through it, mind), smashing the head-removing machine and in the process revealing the entrance to a technologically advanced underground facility, full of things that want to hurt you.
Which would be bad news, were it not for the outstanding combat. Swordplay is satisfying, fair, and rewarding to master, but it’s the talismans that make the combat truly worth raving about. Upon a successful parry or block, Yi gains Qi energy. You need this to use a terrific special move in which Yi slaps a talisman over the enemy. Then if you hold down the button long enough without being interrupted (haha good luck), the talisman explodes, along with a decent chunk of your foes health.
During the boss fights, this rhythm of block-talisman-boom-block-talisman-boom-perfect parry-talisman-BOOM absolutely sings. When you finally get a boss encounter’s attack patterns down, you get these beautiful bouts in which you never take a blow, right down to the sensational moment you finally finish them. Time freezes, the screen goes black except for the white silhouette of your fallen rival, and then you have to go and apologise to your housemate for screaming with joy so loudly at four in the morning.
Boss fights against stoic swordsmen who believe in honour and principles and blahdy blah blah are overdone and Nine Sols agrees. Instead you’re up against a guilt-ridden cackling pink cat and her army of swooping clones. Or a hedonistic party host who’s gleefully fiddling while Rome burns. She plays music to buff her massive diseased brother while he knocks the stuffing out of you. I still think ‘surprise’ second phases are about as welcome a surprise as discovering wasps have learned to use shotguns, but Nine Sols’ bosses are so brilliant I can even overlook one of my five Soulslike sins.
Perfect parries are obviously what you’re aiming for here, but the game cuts you a little slack on either side. Block too early/late and Yi will take internal damage instead. This regenerates over time (somewhere between eternity and forever), so long as Yi doesn’t take an actual blow first. If he does, you’re likely about to take a one-way trip back to the last save point on the slit-throat express. It’s a system that lets you steadily get to grips with that parry, knowing the whole time that the more you rely on an easier-to-execute blocking strategy, the more you're just increasing the chances of the next hit being fatal.
That core combat would be enough to carry a B-tier metroidvania, so it’s frankly just showing off that the developers have put it in a great one. This facility sounds like a dry place to explore on paper—oh be still my beating heart, there’s a warehouse area—but Nine Sols is excellent at catching you off guard. I love the surreal, dreamlike zone which appears to be a pastel pink paradise, except for the ink-blot-like circles that keep expanding and revealing the nasty truth underneath.
Other areas don’t even bother hiding the nastiness. It’s a game that’s horribly curious about how the sausage is made when it comes to the nasty foes you’re fighting. Some are mutated abominations, the results of experiments that even the Umbrella Corporation might find morally suspect. There’s a tank deep in one area that I can’t open, but I can see the shadow of the thing inside, and hear their desperate banging on the glass to be let out. Shudder.
Little surprise, then, that this is from experienced horror developer Red Candle Games, creator of Detention and Devotion. Presumably tired of making acclaimed horror games that got them in hot water, the team has ‘settled’ for making an incredible Sekiro-like. But if the preceding paragraphs haven’t somehow made it clear, horror runs red throughout Nine Sols. It gives the game a wonderfully sharp edge, a feeling that no one is safe and that tragedy could strike at any moment.
I’d probably be less worried about that if it weren’t for Shuanshuan. He’s an adorable moppet who’s big-hearted enthusiasm should be bottled up and sold as a new antidepressant. (Actually, considering the body horror on display here, I probably shouldn’t give these developers ideas.) He hero-worships Yi, possibly because I keep bribing him with little gifts I find on my blood-soaked travels, like sheet music and, er, fertiliser. Children are so easy to get wrong in games/real life, but the consistently lovely writing makes Shuanshuan a terrific counterpoint to the nastiness elsewhere. If Red Candle Games dares hurt my darling son…
Shuanshuan’s the standout, but Nine Sols' supporting cast is great all round. I love Shennong, a villager with a shockingly-powerful metabolism who you feed various poisons and then watch in disgusted awe as he munches them down gleefully. Pour enough toxins in him and he’ll brew you a mysterious drink that knocks you out cold. But you’ll wake up with a bigger health bar, a bit like waking up hungover to discover you drunkenly cleaned the bathroom. Each of the villains is also a wonderful ham, often ringing Yi up for a mwuhahaha-heavy chat. It’s a pretty talky game, but that's no bad thing when it has so much entertaining stuff to say.
If you’ve finished Shadow of the Eldtree/Team Cherry have a restraining order out against you, and you’re sad that nothing else in your Steam library will smack you around in that A-tier soulslike way, then this is an essential purchase.
