A breathtaking journey through pain, discipline, and redemption.
In the contemporary indie landscape, where the metroidvania genre remains one of the most explored and reinterpreted, standing out has grown increasingly difficult. In this context, Nine Sols distinguishes itself immediately — not only through executive quality, but above all through the force with which it imposes its own artistic, narrative, and gameplay identity, making it one of the most significant surprises in recent years within the action-platform scene.
What strikes you immediately about Nine Sols is how the title manages to fuse very different influences into a surprisingly coherent whole. A typically metroidvania exploratory structure pairs with a combat system drawing strong inspiration from the philosophy of *Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice*, built around parry, deflect, and reading enemy offensive patterns. This choice gives the title an immediately recognizable gameplay identity, differentiating it from most of its contemporaries, which tend instead to favor dodging, stamina, and more classical approaches.
But reducing Nine Sols to simply “a metroidvania with parry” would miss the point. The game also builds its identity through a remarkably distinctive artistic imagination, which the developers themselves define as “Taopunk” — a fusion of cyberpunk aesthetics, Eastern mythology, and Taoist philosophy. This blend produces a visually unique universe where advanced technology, ancestral spirituality, monumental architectures, and religious iconographies coexist in perfect balance.
On the narrative side, the title places the player in the role of Yi, an ancient warrior awakened after centuries of oblivion, determined to pursue a personal vendetta against the nine rulers who dominate the kingdom of New Kunlun. The story unfolds as a journey of revenge, mystery, and discovery, where every defeated boss contributes to revealing new fragments of the protagonist’s past and of the world itself.
One of the most interesting aspects of Nine Sols’ introduction is its balance between immediacy and depth. From the very first hours, the game makes its nature perfectly clear: the combat system demands precision, concentration, and learning; the narrative carries significantly more weight than the genre average; exploration rewards attention and curiosity; and the difficulty expects sustained commitment. The game makes no obvious compromises or attempts at excessive simplification to become more “universal.” Nine Sols knows exactly which audience it wants to reach and constructs its entire experience around that awareness. What emerges from the outset is the portrait of an extremely ambitious title, capable of fusing diverse artistic sensibilities into a surprisingly organic proposition. Nine Sols never appears as a simple attempt to ride the popularity of a genre, but rather as a work built with a strong authorial identity, eager to reinterpret established formulas through a fresh sensibility and a strongly recognizable aesthetic.
Nine Sols presents itself as one of the most interesting and mature debuts in the action/metroidvania landscape of recent years: a game that unites technical precision, artistic style, world building, and narrative intensity with a confidence rare for an independent production. From its very introduction, you can see you stand before something that does not simply want to be “a good metroidvania,” but a work with the genuine ambition to leave a mark on the genre.
Here Comes the East
Behind Nine Sols stands Red Candle Games, a Taiwanese independent studio that over recent years has built a very strong reputation through narrative and horror works such as *Detention* and *Devotion* — two titles that distinguished themselves through narrative maturity, strong cultural identity, and a particularly refined approach to atmosphere-building. For this very reason, the announcement of Nine Sols initially surprised much of the audience: the shift from first-person or side-scrolling narrative psychological horrors to a metroidvania action-platformer with a strong focus on combat represented a radical departure from the studio’s previous creative path.
What makes Red Candle Games’ work even more interesting is how the team did not simply change genre, but managed to carry much of its authorial sensibility into a completely different structure. Although Nine Sols belongs to a gameplay lineage far removed from the studio’s previous work, many of the qualities that had defined the team’s reputation remain clearly recognizable: the care for narrative, the obsessive attention to aesthetics, the drive to integrate culture and symbolism deeply into the world building, and above all a conception of the video game as an expressive experience before a purely mechanical one. In other words, Nine Sols never reads as a simple “genre exercise,” but as an attempt to reinterpret an established formula through the creative lens of authors with a precise voice.
Founded in 2015 in Taipei, Red Candle Games stood out from the start for a production philosophy oriented toward strongly authorial and artistically ambitious works. *Detention*, their first project, already showed a strong desire to unite horror, Taiwanese folklore, and historical reflection, while *Devotion* further consolidated the studio’s reputation through intense psychological storytelling and extremely refined aesthetics. Both titles demonstrated that the team had no interest merely in building functional video games, but in using the medium to tell emotionally dense and culturally significant stories. Nine Sols therefore emerges from an already well-defined creative path, even as it represents a significant gameplay deviation.
The studio also chose to self-publish the title, maintaining full control over both development and distribution. This decision carries particular importance, because it underlines the team’s desire to fully preserve its creative freedom without answering to the production logic of an external publisher. In a project so strongly identity-driven and stylistically specific, total creative control clearly reflects itself in the coherence of the final work.
One of the most admirable aspects of the team’s work is the level of competence it displays in approaching a new genre. Moving from narrative horror to a technical and demanding action-platformer represents an enormous design challenge, especially for a studio that until then had never worked on combat systems this complex or exploratory structures this elaborate. And yet, Nine Sols demonstrates a surprising mastery of the genre’s fundamental dynamics — a sign that the team did not limit itself to superficially reinterpreting existing models, but studied carefully the mechanisms that make an effective combat system built on timing, rhythm, and progressive learning.
On the artistic front as well, Red Candle Games continues to demonstrate what one can now consider its distinctive stylistic signature: the ability to fuse cultural tradition and modern design in an extremely elegant form. The creation of the “Taopunk” aesthetic — mixing cyberpunk, Taoism, Eastern architecture, and science fiction — is perhaps the clearest example of this refusal to limit itself to imitation, instead building original and coherent imaginaries. This approach demonstrates that the team does not treat the video game solely as a commercial product, but as a creative space in which to experiment with visual and symbolic languages.
Naturally, self-production also brings risks and limitations, especially in terms of budget and resources. However, the relatively contained size of the studio seems to have actually favored very high quality control and strong attention to detail — elements that emerge clearly in the final work. Rather than scattering its efforts across a production too wide or unfocused, Red Candle Games preferred to concentrate its energies on an extremely polished project, refined in its details and built around a precise vision.
Ultimately, Red Candle Games’ work on Nine Sols amounts to a genuine demonstration of creative maturity. The studio not only managed to reinvent itself by tackling a completely new genre, but did so while keeping its artistic identity and authorial ambition fully intact. The result is the portrait of a team that does not fear experimentation, that deeply understands the language of the medium, and that continues to show how even an independent production can reach levels of quality, personality, and coherence that truly stand out.
An Innovative Depth
The plot represents one of the most surprising elements of the entire production, especially considering the genre the title belongs to. Nine Sols chooses to assign its story a central weight, constructing an articulated, layered, and constantly present narrative throughout the entire experience. This is not lore left only in the background or entrusted exclusively to optional descriptions and environmental details, but a genuine active narrative that accompanies and sustains the player’s entire progression.
The story revolves around Yi, an ancient warrior and legendary hero belonging to the Solarian race, awakened after an extremely long period of hibernation in a world that has changed profoundly from the one he knew. The protagonist emerges from this centuries-long sleep driven by a precise objective: to avenge himself against the Nine Sols, the powerful rulers who dominate the city-kingdom of New Kunlun, an enormous suspended metropolis that unites highly advanced technology, spirituality, and monumental architectures in a universe as fascinating as it is decadent. This narrative premise, apparently linear, develops far more elaborately than the simple “revenge story” structure might suggest. Revenge never functions as a simple superficial engine for the action; instead, it becomes the starting point for a tale that gradually explores Yi’s past, his relationships with the other Sols, the reasons for his fall, and above all the moral contradictions that lie beneath the central conflict.
One of the plot’s most successful aspects is precisely how the game uses narrative progression to slowly deconstruct the player’s initial certainties. What at first appears as a clear and almost archetypal mission reveals itself to be progressively far more complex and morally nuanced. Every Sol defeated, every new dialogue fragment, every recovered memory contributes to redefining the perception of past events, making the distinction between right and wrong, victim and perpetrator, hero and guilty party increasingly blurred. This is how Yi’s journey transforms into something far more reflective and tragic. The game never paints the protagonist as a pure or uncontestable hero, but as a figure deeply marked by his own past, his own errors, and his own obsessions. Yi does not fight only against his enemies, but also against the weight of his previous choices, against guilt, and against what the world he helped create has become.
Parallel to the protagonist’s personal story, Nine Sols also develops an extremely rich narrative world building, gradually constructing the history of Solarian civilization, the founding of New Kunlun, the motivations that drove the birth of the Nine Sols regime, and the philosophical and ideological tensions running through the game world. This context considerably broadens the scope of the story, ensuring that the plot never remains confined to simple personal vendetta but expands to touch much larger themes: the relationship between progress and spirituality, immortality and sacrifice, authority and free will.
Another particularly successful element is how the game distributes narrative information. Despite carrying a narrative component far more explicit than the genre average, Nine Sols never falls into excessive verbal exposition. The story unfolds through dialogue, cutscenes, memories, environmental interactions, and documents, always maintaining a good balance between direct explanation and progressive discovery. This keeps the story engaging without excessively interrupting the gameplay rhythm.
On the emotional front, the plot also distinguishes itself through its surprisingly mature tone. Despite the fantastical and science fiction elements, the story tackles themes of great emotional weight: betrayal, loss, personal failure, moral responsibility, desire for redemption, and the inability to let go of the past. All of this gives the story a depth rare for the genre and contributes to making many moments along the journey particularly intense.
Naturally, this very narrative density can make Nine Sols less immediately accessible than other titles in the same lineage. Players expecting a simple and functional story might find the structure more elaborate and reflective than anticipated. However, for those seeking a genuinely meaningful narrative component within an action-platformer, the title represents one of the most solid and mature offerings of recent years.
Themes as Human as They Are Intense
If the plot already stands as one of the game’s most successful elements, it is in the quality of its narrative construction and the depth of the themes it tackles that the title truly elevates itself above most productions belonging to its genre.
One of the most evident aspects is the centrality of the theme of revenge, which at first appears to function as the main engine of the entire experience. Yi undertakes his journey with the stated objective of eliminating the Nine Sols and avenging a wrong suffered, but the game intelligently avoids treating this journey according to the more traditional canons of vengeful heroism. Revenge does not appear as a liberatory or automatically justified act, but as an impulse laden with ambiguity, pain, and moral consequences. As the story develops, the game forces the player to question not so much “who deserves to die,” but the very meaning of this desire for payback and what it costs those who pursue it.
Directly connected to this is another of the game’s major themes: the moral responsibility of power. The Nine Sols are not simply bosses to defeat or two-dimensional antagonists; they represent figures of authority, leadership, and dominion, each embodying a different vision of control, justice, and the relationship with progress. Through confrontation with these characters, Nine Sols reflects on how power can corrupt, deform initial intentions, and transform even noble ideals into instruments of oppression. But the story’s strength lies in not limiting itself to a simplistic reading of “power as evil”: many of the Sols act convinced they pursue a greater good, making the conflict far more nuanced and morally ambiguous.
Another extremely central theme is the relationship between technological progress and spirituality, which permeates the entire construction of the game world. The “Taopunk” universe of Nine Sols is not only an original aesthetic choice, but also a conceptual tool through which the game places two apparently opposing worldviews in dialogue: on one side, technology, scientific control, the pursuit of evolution and immortality; on the other, Taoist philosophy, harmony, acceptance of the natural cycle, and detachment from the ego. This ideological conflict constantly runs through the narrative and reflects itself in both the characters and the structure of the world itself. In this sense, the game uses science fiction not as mere spectacular backdrop, but as a means of posing profound philosophical questions. Nine Sols reflects on the desire to transcend one’s own limits, to dominate death, to bend the world to one’s will. But at the same time it interrogates the price of this ambition, suggesting that the attempt to control everything can transform itself into a destructive force. This gives the story an almost tragic dimension, where the pursuit of progress does not appear as pure emancipation, but as a constant risk of losing balance.
The theme of personal identity and memory also runs very strong. Yi is not a static protagonist: his journey does not consist solely in eliminating enemies, but in progressively confronting his own past, his own guilt, and his own contradictions. Memory becomes a tool for identity reconstruction, but also a source of pain, because every new truth discovered forces the protagonist to reconsider everything that once seemed settled. This gives the narrative a strong introspective dimension that enormously enriches the figure of the protagonist.
On the structural level, Nine Sols’ narrative also stands out for its balance. Despite being far more present than the metroidvania average, it never smothers the gameplay or excessively interrupts the experience’s rhythm. The game integrates dialogue, flashbacks, contemplative moments, and environmental lore well, maintaining constant narrative engagement without sacrificing the fluidity of progression.
Nine Sols’ narrative manages to stand apart because it treats the video game not only as a sequence of events, but as a space for interrogating universal and complex themes: revenge, guilt, power, progress, identity, spirituality, and human fallibility. It is a story that uses science fiction and action to tell something profoundly human, and precisely for this reason it manages to leave an impact that goes well beyond the simple pleasure of gameplay.
Extraordinarily Striking
On the visual side, Nine Sols is one of those titles that manage to strike you immediately from the very first glance, imposing its own aesthetic identity with a force that is rare even within an indie landscape long rich with stylistically refined productions. What makes the game’s artistic department truly special is not only the technical quality of its execution, but above all the coherence and originality of its aesthetic direction, which manages to fuse apparently very distant influences into a surprisingly harmonious and recognizable vision. Nine Sols does not limit itself to being “beautiful to look at”: it constructs an authentically distinctive visual imaginary, capable of becoming an integral part of its identity.
The central element of this identity is without doubt the already-mentioned Taopunk aesthetic, a term the developers themselves use to describe the game world as a fusion of cyberpunk, science fiction, Taoist iconography, and traditional Eastern architecture. This concept does not remain a mere marketing label, but concretely translates into every aspect of the title’s art design, producing a world that is visually unique in its genre. New Kunlun’s environments display an extraordinary capacity to combine traditional and futuristic elements: suspended temples coexist with industrial structures, holographic panels, and highly advanced technologies; statues and spiritual symbols intertwine with circuits, pipes, machinery, and mechanical infrastructure. The result is a world that manages to feel simultaneously ancient and futuristic, mystical and technological, organic and artificial. This visual fusion never appears forced or artificial, but perfectly integrated into the logic of the world building, making every area immediately recognizable and memorable.
On the purely technical side, the game employs hand-drawn 2D graphics with extremely fluid and detailed animations, thanks to the efficiency of the Unity engine. Character animation deserves particular mention. Yi and all the principal enemies possess an extraordinary fluidity of movement, with smooth transitions and excellent readability even during the most hectic combat phases. This aspect matters not only aesthetically but functionally to the gameplay, especially given the extremely technical nature of the combat system. In a game so strongly built on timing, parry, and reading enemy patterns, the visual clarity of animations is fundamental, and Nine Sols excels precisely here, always offering readable and precise visual feedback.
Character design also represents one of the production’s highest points. Every principal character — boss or otherwise — possesses a distinctive silhouette, an immediately recognizable design, and a strong symbolic value tied to his or her personality or narrative role. The Nine Sols in particular never appear as simple “end-of-area bosses,” but as almost mythological figures, built visually to communicate power, authority, and uniqueness. Each of them clearly reflects a different philosophy, aesthetic, and scenic presence, reinforcing the variety of the experience.
The use of color proves equally intelligent. Nine Sols alternates cold and technological chromatic palettes with explosions of red, gold, and warmer tones tied to spiritual elements or moments of greater emotional and narrative intensity. This chromatic management is not accidental, but contributes strongly to the construction of atmosphere and to the distinction of various areas, giving each environment its own emotional identity beyond the aesthetic one.
The level design also benefits enormously from the art direction. The environments are not only beautiful to observe, but built with great attention to scenic depth and visual layering. Animated backgrounds, overlapping structures, multilevel architectural elements, and environmental details all contribute to creating a strong sense of verticality and three-dimensionality within a two-dimensional structure. This gives the game world a perception of grandeur and complexity far superior to what the purely 2D structure might suggest.
Naturally, being an indie production, Nine Sols does not reach the absolute level of detail or the technical complexity of some AAA productions — but that would be an entirely misplaced criticism. The game does not aim at photorealism or technical spectacle as an end in itself: its strength lies in stylization, coherence, and identity. And on this front, it competes without any difficulty with productions carrying far greater budgets.
So, the technical and artistic department of Nine Sols represents one of its most impressive qualities — not only for the undeniable beauty of its environments or the fluidity of its animations, but above all for the capacity to build an authentically original, coherent, and narratively meaningful visual imaginary. Every graphical element of the game seems to serve a precise purpose: not only to impress visually, but to contribute to the construction of a world that feels alive, credible, and charged with meaning. It is artistic work of the highest level, capable of making Nine Sols immediately recognizable even long after you put it down.
High Sonic Quality
If Nine Sols’ visual department represents one of the elements that immediately strikes the player, it is through the work on the audio side that the game fully completes its atmospheric identity, transforming its aesthetics into a complete and profoundly immersive sensory experience. In a title so strongly built on rhythm, tension, spectacle, and emotional intensity, sound cannot limit itself to an accessory role: it must sustain the gameplay, reinforce the narrative, and amplify the sense of presence in the game world. Nine Sols achieves all of this with surprising quality, building a refined, extremely well-crafted audio department that integrates perfectly into the general philosophy of the work.
One of the most evident aspects of the audio production is the excellent quality of the soundtrack, which accompanies the player throughout the adventure with a composition that perfectly fuses orchestral elements, electronic sonorities, and traditional Eastern musical influences. This choice reflects the title’s entire artistic philosophy impeccably: just as the visual world fuses ancient spirituality and futuristic technology, the music also unites instruments, melodies, and structures evoking the Eastern tradition with synthetic soundscapes, modern rhythms, and arrangements more typically associated with science fiction. The result is a soundtrack extremely coherent with the game’s Taopunk concept, capable of constantly reinforcing the work’s unique identity.
The ambient music distinguishes itself through the ability to accompany exploration without ever feeling invasive or redundant. In the more contemplative moments, the game uses more subdued, melancholic, and atmospheric tracks, often built on minimal melodies, long notes, and ethereal arrangements that amplify the sense of mystery and spirituality permeating New Kunlun. These compositions manage to convey a feeling of grandeur, antiquity, and solemnity, contributing enormously to the perception of the world as a place decadent yet still profoundly alive with memory and meaning.
During combat, and in particular during boss encounters, the soundtrack radically changes tone, increasing intensity, rhythm, and aggressiveness. The tracks dedicated to the principal battles become far more dynamic, percussive, and tense, perfectly emphasizing the technical and frenetic nature of the clashes. The result is that every boss fight acquires a strong sonic identity beyond the visual and mechanical, contributing to making it memorable not only for its difficulty or design, but also for its overall emotional and spectacular impact.
The combat sound design proves equally fundamental and deserves particular attention. In a system strongly built on parry, deflect, and precise timing reading, every sound feedback must be perfectly readable and immediate. Nine Sols excels precisely here: every deflected blow produces a sharp, satisfying, recognizable sound; every successful impact communicates weight and precision; every error or received hit comes with clear and distinct sonic feedback. This work carries not only an aesthetic function, but is essential to the gameplay itself, because it helps the player internalize the combat rhythm and intuitively read the outcome of their actions.
Particularly successful is the sense of sonic “weight” attributed to the clashes. Every weapon, every impact, and every parry seems to carry a real consistency, a perceptible physicality that gives the combat system tangible satisfaction. In a game where combat demands extreme precision, this acoustic physicality is fundamental for making every success genuinely gratifying. The simple sound of a perfect deflect, for example, often manages to convey a sense of satisfaction almost as strong as the corresponding visual animation.
The ambient sound design also contributes notably to world construction. Mechanical noises, industrial sounds, distant winds, technological vibrations, metallic reverberations, and small environmental details constantly populate the spaces of New Kunlun, making the world feel alive, complex, and functional. The city never reads as a simple static backdrop, but as a genuinely inhabited, pulsing, active structure. This contributes enormously to the sense of immersion and to the credibility of the narrative universe.
Nine Sols’ audio department firmly represents one of its elements of excellence. The soundtrack magnificently reinforces the game’s artistic identity, the sound design supports the combat system with surgical precision, and the sonic environment constantly contributes to the credibility of the game world. It is audio work of the highest level, demonstrating once again the extraordinary care with which Red Candle Games built every single aspect of its work.
A Perfect Fusion
What stands out in Nine Sols is the perfect balance between world building and gameplay. In many titles of the genre, these two aspects coexist without necessarily truly fusing, but in Nine Sols every structural, narrative, and mechanical choice appears built to sustain the other, producing a world that is not only beautiful to observe or interesting to explore, but that becomes an integral part of the gameplay rhythm and the player’s progression. The title manages to ensure that every new area, every newly acquired ability, every exploratory detour, and every combat simultaneously contributes both to mechanical growth and to the enrichment of the narrative universe.
On the world building front, the title excels in constructing a layered, credible, and personality-rich world. New Kunlun, the gigantic suspended city-kingdom where the adventure takes place, never reads as a simple collection of artificially connected levels, but as an organic, coherent structure with its own architectural and functional logic. Every area of the game clearly conveys the sensation of belonging to a larger ecosystem: laboratories, industrial districts, sanctuaries, military structures, spiritual gardens, and advanced technological zones coexist as parts of a single complex civilization, contributing to making the world tangible and realistic despite its highly fantastical nature.
What strikes particularly is how every area tells something not only through dialogue or explicit lore, but through its very structure and atmosphere. The architecture, the colors, the environmental details, the layout of spaces, and even the type of enemies present constantly help communicate the function, history, and identity of each place. This attention to environmental storytelling gives great depth to the game world, making exploration interesting even on the purely contemplative and interpretive level.
On the structural front, Nine Sols follows the classic metroidvania approach, building an interconnected map where progression advances through the gradual acquisition of new abilities and tools that allow access to previously inaccessible areas. However, the game interprets this formula with great intelligence, always maintaining a good balance between exploratory freedom and directionality. The game leaves the player free enough to feel genuinely engaged in exploration, but rarely so free as to become frustratingly lost or wander without clear objectives.
The map itself is built with great attention to the flow of progression. Connections between areas feel generally natural, backtracking appears functional and rarely artificial, and the distribution of save points and fast travel keeps the experience’s rhythm very well calibrated. The level design manages to find an excellent compromise between verticality, branching, and readability, offering environments intricate enough to feel stimulating but never excessively confusing or frustrating.
But the true heart of Nine Sols’ gameplay is without doubt its combat system, probably one of the most praised aspects of the entire production. This influence appears unmistakably in the absolute centrality of the parry/deflect mechanic, which constitutes the fulcrum of the entire combat experience. Nine Sols also pushes the player toward an extremely aggressive and reactive philosophy: the key to success is not simply avoiding danger, but confronting it head-on, reading enemy patterns, entering their rhythm, and responding with surgical precision. This makes every combat far more dynamic and engaging, transforming clashes into genuine rhythmic “dances” where observation, muscle memory, and timing are fundamental. Every enemy, even apparently simpler ones, is designed to teach the player something, forcing them to read visual cues, understand attack timings, and constantly improve their execution. Boss fights in particular represent some of the best moments in the entire experience: long, technical, spectacular, and demanding, they require progressive learning and complete mastery of the mechanics. Every boss becomes almost a final examination of everything learned up to that point. Further enriching the combat system are secondary abilities, special attacks, explosive talismans, and various upgrades that gradually broaden the strategic options without ever compromising the centrality of technical precision. The game therefore manages to maintain depth without becoming needlessly complex, offering a demanding but always readable learning curve.
Naturally, this very approach makes Nine Sols a relatively demanding title. This is not a game designed for those seeking a relaxed or permissive experience: it requires attention, patience, and a willingness to improve through failure. However, the satisfaction this structure returns is enormous, because every step forward registers as genuine personal growth on the player’s part, not simple numerical advancement.
World building and gameplay fuse in Nine Sols with a rare quality. The world is not merely a container for the action, but an integral part of the experience; gameplay is not simple mechanics, but the perfect expression of the game’s own philosophy. The result is a title that manages to be simultaneously satisfying to explore, gratifying to master, and profoundly immersive to inhabit.
It Convinces
Critically analyzing Nine Sols means engaging with a work that, despite standing out as one of the most solid and surprising productions in the recent indie landscape, is not without limits or potentially divisive choices. Indeed, part of its strength derives precisely from the fact that this is a game extremely conscious of its own identity, its own influences, and the type of experience it wants to deliver. This design confidence often allows it to excel, but at the same time makes it a title little inclined toward compromise — one that at certain moments can feel selective, demanding, or less accessible than its initial aesthetic appearance might suggest.
One of the first aspects worth reflection concerns its relationship with the metroidvania genre. Despite clearly belonging to this category, Nine Sols frequently shifts its focus so markedly toward technical combat that it partially sacrifices the free, contemplative exploration component many associate with the heart of the traditional metroidvania experience. Exploration is certainly present, well-built, and satisfying, but rarely becomes the dominant element of the experience. The overall feeling is that the game has more interest in using the metroidvania structure as support for combat progression than as the fulcrum of the adventure itself.
The combat system too, despite being probably the game’s strongest point, can paradoxically become one of its most divisive aspects. The strong inspiration from Sekiro’s philosophy gives the gameplay exceptional precision and depth, but also implies significant structural rigidity: the system builds itself around parry, deflect, and perfect timing, which means the game rewards almost exclusively those who fully adapt to that specific combat philosophy. No real alternative approaches or radically different playstyles exist: those who never enter the rhythm the system demands risk simply not enjoying it. It is a very coherent choice, but also inevitably limiting on the accessibility front.
For precisely this reason, Nine Sols can result significantly more demanding than the average modern metroidvania — not because of artificial or poorly calibrated difficulty, but because of the constant demand for precision, attention, and technical learning. Boss fights, however excellently designed, can become very severe obstacles, especially for those unfamiliar with games demanding pattern reading, sharp reflexes, and patience in progressive learning. In this sense, the title risks alienating a portion of the audience less inclined toward challenge or more interested in a primarily exploratory and narrative experience.
Another possible criticism concerns the rhythm of narrative and gameplay progression in the central phases. Although the overall balance is very good, there are certain moments where the game tends slightly to reiterate its structure without introducing radical variations. The quality of the level design and combat system almost always manages to maintain attention, but in certain sections one can sense a degree of underlying familiarity in the proposed dynamics. This never amounts to true monotony, but the sense of constant mechanical discovery that characterizes the first hours does stabilize somewhat as the system reaches its full maturity.
On the narrative front, while the writing is of the highest level for the genre, not all audiences might appreciate its denser and more reflective tone. Nine Sols dedicates considerably more space to narrative than most of its contemporaries, but this inevitably brings a greater presence of dialogue, expository moments, and slower passages that interrupt pure action. For some players this represents an enormous added value; for others it may appear as a slight rhythm break, especially if their primary interest remains focused on gameplay.
The progression system too, while functional, does not reach the same excellence as other components. Upgrades, secondary abilities, and character customization options are well-implemented but relatively contained, without offering a huge variety of builds or alternative approaches. This makes character growth satisfying but less deep than other action-RPG or metroidvania titles that place greater emphasis on build freedom.
All that said, it is important to note that none of these aspects genuinely compromises the overall quality of the work. Nine Sols’ criticisms almost always derive not from design deficiencies or obvious errors, but from precise design choices coherent with the team’s vision. The game knows exactly what it wants to be and builds every element to serve that vision as effectively as possible. And if this inevitably brings a certain selectivity toward its audience, this is also precisely what allows it to have such a strong personality.
Nine Sols
PRO
- Excellent and extremely deep combat system
- Memorable and splendidly designed boss fights
- Extraordinary and immediately recognizable artistic direction
- Surprisingly mature narrative for the genre
- World building of the highest level
- Excellent sound design and soundtrack
- Extremely gratifying learning curve
- Great artistic and design coherence
CON
- High and unaccommodating difficulty
- Combat system very rigid in its philosophy
- Exploration less dominant than in other metroidvania
- Mechanical progression slightly less varied in the second half
- Limited customization system
- Can feel too narrative-heavy for some players
8.5/10
