Nine Sols is One of My Favorite Games Ever

After writing my Silksong review (see here), and going through other writers opinions on the game, I found out about Nine Sols. Specifically, about the difficulty settings. This lead to me immediately adding it to my wishlist and once the Steam Fall sale came around I quickly grabbed it and started playing it.

Nine Sols is a game filled with themes about challenging the established order because it just hasn't worked and has lead only to suffering, about fighting not just for revenge, but for a better tomorrow for someone you care about, and about how sometimes you have to fight people you used to care for because they have been corrupted by the worst versions of themselves.

But I didn't know any of that going in. I only knew it was parry centric and that it was more samurai like. People compared it to Sekiro, which I didn't enjoy much despite knowing it was great. So then what was it like to play? Was it as difficult as Sekiro? Did it have a story that was intriguing beyond just a simple thematic purpose? Was the combat amazing? Was it just as good as I heard? Time to find out.

The Premise

In a Taopunk (Cyberpunk with many Taoism aspects) world you play Yi, a Solarian who had his mentor attempt to kill him. He fell off a cliff and managed to survive thanks to the healing nature of magical roots that absorbed him in for 500 years. Eventually, he is awoken by a human boy named ShuanShuan playing the flute and decides that it's time to go on a revenge filled rampage against not just his mentor, but also his former peers and those that he considered friends. He decides that maybe the world that exists, the world that those 9 Solarians built, those 9 Sols, needs to be overthrown. That overthrowing it wouldn't just help fulfill his revengeful desires, but also would actually help his fellow Solarians and the humans that exist underneath them. Will he be able to help his fellow Solarians? Will he be able to track down all 9 Sols? Or will he die, for real this time?

The Good

The combat is fantastic. Parrying can take some getting used to, but, once you are used to it, it becomes second nature and feels incredibly enjoyable. Once you parry you can do a talisman explosion where you rush past an enemy by pressing a button and then hold that button until you release it or it explodes. This doesn't always kill your enemy but when it doesn't kill it still does a ton of damage. They also stack so if you do a rush forward, but get hit so can't finish your explosion then you can do it again, as long as you still have QI charges that are refilled on parry, and get an even bigger explosion. Then there are things called Jades which are basically the equivalent to charms in Hollow Knight. They add some useful effects like one I added that allows me to do my talisman parry explosion on 5 enemies at once.

The accessibility settings (yes difficulty settings are accessibility settings) allow you to change how much damage you take and how much damage you dish out. This can make the game go much shorter or much longer. And at the same time these things help you learn, but they don't make the game super duper easy. In fact, I had mine tuned to me doing double, then triple, damage and still ended up dying to multiple boss fights not because of me being bad at the game but because they're genuinely complex fights that force you to know how to counter all the attacks before you. This touches on how you can have these difficulty settings without removing the core mechanical difficulty, that are a more interesting difficulty than damage based difficulty, but that's for another article that'll come out next week (that's a teaser).

The style of this game just leaps off the screen. From the wonderful final attack on bosses leading to a black background with white silhouette of you and the boss, to the crazy design of much of the Taopunk world that the game takes place in. It's amazing how stylish the game is and how much I just adored every single moment in.

One of my favorite moments that shows the style takes place during the sequence going after the boss Lady Ethereal. A fantastic boss fight, but there's weird repetitive moments before where you are basically going around in circles all trying to convince her that she's stuck in a dreamscape that isn't real. It leads to a lot of creepy shit, the most difficult platforming in the entire game, but mainly just because of time sensitivity while providing a decent amount of checkpoints along the way and the game glitching out (screenshot of one moment of it below). I didn't expect that to happen and when it did I knew that Nine Sols is easily one of my favorite games I have played this year and possibly ever.

There's also moments sometimes during important moments that also show the style when the game uses comic-like panels to convey moments of importance so as to keep the style and not distract the player with a cutscene. The game is aware of itself being a videogame and it wants to provide you an interesting and unique experience while being aware of that. The comic sections are such a fantastic way of adding an extra kick of style while providing dialogue and more interesting scenes I'm just so glad they were such a core part of the experience.

Then there's the moments of quiet that give you more of that style. From talking with and doing stuff with ShuanShuan at the Pavilion and drinking poison tea with Shennong, to smoking your pipe as both a way to chill out in a reclining chair that Shuan made and as the way to heal. You constantly have moments where Yi and the world around him are positively brimming with stylish personality that is not something I have ever experienced in this kind of game...so far.

The story and themes, which I mildly touched on in my introduction, are also incredibly intriguing and captivating. I usually have issues reading all of the dialogue in games because my brain wanders and I have to reread it a couple times because of both my ADHD and dyslexia. Here though, I wanted to keep reading and paying attention because it drew me in so effectively. The push for toppling the established order is particularly intriguing and really helped me pay attention.

Then there's Yi. He's this super talented dude, even surviving death multiple times. He says "fuck you" to his former peers after they've gone mad with power and does so in such an off-hand and snide way that you can feel the contempt he has for them. There's no way you can't see how powerful and badass he is. And yet he still has moments of caring. Like how he plays a game with ShuanShuan, teaching him how to play until Shuan finally manages to beat him. Or how his relationship with his sister, Heng, is depicted in flashbacks where he obviously cared about her and wanted the best for her. Of course, that comes back around to show that he's a complicated person because he eventually is emotionally hurt by a decision his sister makes and lashes out at her, he's a complicated person and you can see that everywhere. He's also survived death and significant damage to himself so many times but still pushes forward to complete his goal because he won't let risk of death stop him. He's just such a good main character that I could gush about for a while.

The Bad

My only real problem, honestly, is that there isn't any kind of quest tracker. You mostly have to remember, but there's no direct "here's what you're currently working on" place in the menu. So I had a few moments where I had forgotten where I was supposed to go. You're told the initial direction in conversations, which makes sense, but sometimes people like me play games where I don't remember every single conversation in the game and also have other shit going on in my life so I get distracted and just lose track of what I'm supposed to be doing. I figure it out eventually, but having a quest tracking system would have fixed my only criticism.

There is also a minor nitpick though where there are attacks that have a red fire to them that can't be parried by normal means. Eventually, you unlock the ability to create a cloud of parry stuff around you after holding then releasing your parry button at the right time. The problem arises that you can't hold it infinitely. So after a very short period of time you'll end up letting go of the charge. This takes significant getting used to because you have to figure out the right timing for each new enemy type that uses these types of attacks. It's just a learning thing and it took a lot of time for me to figure it out. There's this moment later in the game where I had to parry a bunch of things in a row to unlock a door. This really solidified all of my parry skills, but before that I just had issues with the charge parry. But oh well, that's fine, it just requires time and persistence to get right. And turning down the damage you take allows you be able to persist without having to keep resetting and shit.

The Ending - Detailed

**Start Spoilers**

There are a few endings to the game, as with many games that review, so I will be solely going over the ending I got as opposed to all possible endings. Yours might be slightly different if you do different things than me or just complete more of the side stuff than me.

After discovering that the virus that prompted the Solarians to warp to the planet you're currently on was actually a byproduct of an immortality project done by Yi's mentor, Eigong, you face her in her soulscape where she tries to lock you up and keep you from escaping so she can go and finish her plan to become truly immortal. That doesn't work out after Yi has another memory of him and Heng before the warp where she says she's not coming with. Yi is not happy and they part for the last time.

Yi then escapes the soulscape only to find out that the Pavilion, your home base, was attacked and Abacus has been, effectively, destroyed. While ShuanShuan and Kuafu are okay. After telling Shaun that they'll be going to Penglai after Yi defeats Eigong, Yi heads off to the top of that tower that you passed at the start of the game and likely have many many times since.

Once at the top we see some reveals in holographic Council meetings where it's shown that Yi is definitely a Sol, that he is the one who created the Warp system to get the Solarians to New Kunlun, that he is the one who decided to use brains of the humans to power the computers that keep the rest of the Solarians asleep, and that he is the one who picked the planet you are currently on so that they could harvest the brains of the locals. The very system that we see at the start of the game that Yi saves ShuanShuan from. We also see Yi confront Eigong for her being the one to create the virus that killed so many of the Solarians, including Yi's parents and sister.

Then it's time for the fight. Yi defeats her after much discussion and a very long battle. She dies with the knowledge that Yi, her mentee, is her greatest triumph, but only because he has done everything he can to stop her.

Then Yi warps the entire fucking island to Penglai where, after some fading to black, we find him praying.Likely to his sisters flower (which happens when the people who are plagued by the virus die so that the flower allows the virus to propagate). He then walks to a tram thing where we pass the systems of the cryo sleep (I assume) and come to what is essentially a throne room with ShuanShuan, another child, and another adult human. Yi sits to play a game with the second child. Credits.

**End Spoilers**

The Ending - Reaction

I loved it. No notes. I think the reveals were meaningful and had callbacks, the conclusion was satisfying, and the world felt like there was progress while not having to answer all the questions and problems put forward. It was perfect.

The Conclusion

Nine Sols is an amazing experience that I enjoyed every single moment in. I've been done with it for a while and I still have been thinking back and comparing to the current games I'm playing. The combat, the world, the snappiness of the gameplay, the fantastic mechanics, everything is amazing and I adore it. The ending just solidified my love for it and my belief that this is the best metroidvania I will likely ever play, not just because of everything I've already mentioned, but also because of the accessibility settings that allowed me, someone who is not amazing at difficult games, to play and enjoy the game to the fullest extent I can.

If you're interested in playing a metroidvania game that has so many amazing things in it, and you're someone who routinely puts down difficult games, then you should play Nine Sols. Put yourself a little out of your comfort zone and play a game where you get to choose how much friction you want to experience. Play a game that will make you love every moment of it, that'll make you interested in the characters and the world and everything. Just play it.

Meow,

Cat