Nine Sols is the kind of game that makes you say, “I’ll just clear this room,” and then look up to discover the sky has gone suspiciously dark outside. Red Candle Games has built a 2D action platformer with the bones of a metroidvania, the timing-heavy combat of a certain famous shinobi game, and a story that keeps getting stranger the longer you sit with it. I expected stylish fights and gloomy corridors. I did not expect Nine Sols to get so interested in grief, control, and what people are willing to sacrifice for survival.
That combination is why Nine Sols stuck with me after the usual review thoughts had evaporated. It is difficult, sometimes demanding in ways that feel almost personal, but it is also unusually deliberate. Every new ability changes how you read the world. Every boss seems designed to punish the exact habit you developed during the last three hours. I kept getting knocked flat, muttering at the monitor, and immediately pressing retry. Annoying? Absolutely. Compelling? Even more so.
What Nine Sols Actually Feels Like to Play
At a glance, Nine Sols looks like a side-scrolling exploration game with a gorgeous hand-drawn style. You guide Yi through New Kunlun, a decaying sci-fi setting where ancient technology, mystical symbolism, and industrial machinery sit on top of each other like layers of badly buried history. The map gradually opens as you gain movement tools and combat upgrades, so backtracking is part of the rhythm rather than a chore forced into the design.
The combat is the real hook. Yi’s deflection system asks you to meet attacks instead of simply running away or absorbing damage. A well-timed parry can turn an enemy’s aggression against it, while a poorly timed response leaves you staggered and wishing you had paid attention during the tutorial. The timing feels tight without being completely unreadable, and the best encounters teach through repetition. You lose, notice one animation, return, and suddenly the entire fight makes more sense.
Nine Sols is not a button-mashing power fantasy. Regular enemies can still make you work, particularly when the game combines projectile patterns with close-range attacks. Healing is limited enough to keep tension alive, but upgrades gradually give you more ways to recover, redirect damage, and prepare for specific threats. The result is a combat loop that rewards focus. Playing while half-watching a video on a second monitor is a terrible idea. I tried it. Yi suffered for my lack of discipline.
A World Built From Contradictions
The setting is where Nine Sols starts feeling more ambitious than its genre label suggests. New Kunlun is bright with neon, screens, laboratories, and elegant machinery, yet the atmosphere is constantly pressing down on you. Behind the clean interfaces and grand promises is a society shaped by fear. The game does not explain every piece of its history immediately, which makes exploration feel like pulling loose threads from a very expensive, very haunted sweater.
Yi works well as the player’s anchor because his personal journey is not just a convenient excuse to visit every region. His anger, confusion, and stubbornness affect how the world reads. The characters around him are not all equally developed, but several side stories add texture to the main conflict. Conversations can be funny in a dry, unexpected way, then turn painful when you realize what someone has been avoiding.
The art direction deserves attention without reducing it to “pretty indie game.” Nine Sols mixes traditional East Asian-inspired visual ideas with cyberpunk machinery and unsettling body horror. Its enemies can look elegant from a distance and deeply unpleasant up close. Background details often suggest a life beyond the immediate route, from abandoned workspaces to systems still running long after their owners disappeared. This one understands that environmental storytelling works best when it gives you questions instead of placing a giant arrow over the answer.
The Bosses Demand More Than Reflexes
Boss fights are where Nine Sols makes its identity impossible to miss. They are not simply large health bars with louder music. Most bosses have a readable visual language, distinct phases, and attacks that force you to understand the deflection system. You can sometimes scrape through a battle by dealing damage recklessly, but the game clearly wants you to learn the rhythm rather than brute-force it.
That learning curve will not work for everyone. Some encounters feel like walls, especially if you arrive with an underdeveloped build or have not fully absorbed the rules of posture, talismans, and healing. The difficulty is usually fair, but fair does not mean gentle. Nine Sols expects you to remember patterns. It also expects you to accept that the first attempt is often research, not failure.
The best fights create that rare moment when panic becomes concentration. Your hands stop flailing. The boss enters a familiar sequence. You parry, reposition, place a talisman, and land the final strike with one sliver of health left. I have played expensive action games that never delivered that clean a feeling of improvement. Nine Sols earns its hardest moments because the answer is usually visible, even when it is not immediately obvious.
Where the Experience Gets Rough Around the Edges
Nine Sols is not frictionless. The map can take time to read, and backtracking occasionally feels less satisfying when you remember a blocked passage but cannot recall which upgrade will open it. Some dialogue and story beats also move at a pace that asks for patience. If you want a game that explains its mythology in tidy paragraphs and keeps every objective glowing on the screen, this one might feel deliberately evasive.
The combat can create its own fatigue. Repeated attempts are part of the appeal, but a few battles push close to the line between “I am learning” and “I am doing homework.” Accessibility options help make the experience more approachable, and using them is not a betrayal of the intended challenge. The point is to enjoy the journey, not to prove anything to a digital catacomb.
A little unevenness also appears in the quieter sections. The platforming is functional, and movement improves as Yi gains abilities, but it is not always as expressive as the combat. Some rooms feel like connective tissue between stronger ideas. That is normal for a game of this size, yet the contrast is noticeable when you have just finished a brilliant boss encounter.
Should You Play Nine Sols?
If you enjoy games such as Hollow Knight, Ender Lilies, or Sekiro and want a side-scrolling adventure with a more personal science-fiction identity, Nine Sols deserves a serious look. It is especially easy to recommend to players who like discovering lore through scattered details rather than receiving a lecture every twenty minutes. The story has emotional weight, but it does not forget to be weird, colorful, and occasionally funny.
I would be more cautious if precise parrying sounds exhausting or if repeated boss attempts make you want to launch your controller into a tasteful Portland rainstorm. The game offers ways to adjust the challenge, but its core design still revolves around timing and attention. You cannot completely separate Nine Sols from that demand, and you should not have to. It is the point.
The Steam version is a strong fit for headphones, a comfortable controller, and an evening when you are willing to be humbled. Give it a little room before deciding whether the difficulty is for you. Once the combat clicks, the world starts opening in two directions at once: physically through new routes, and emotionally through revelations that reframe what you thought you understood.
Nine Sols is polished enough to recommend confidently but strange enough to feel like someone made it because they had something specific to say. It is challenging, stylish, occasionally awkward, and full of small details that reward curiosity. I thought I knew what this game was. I did not. This one earned my evening.
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