.png)
Nine Sols Review
- Taylor Rioux
- Jun 13
- 7 min read
SPOILER WARNING: Some plot spoilers for Nine Sols are contained within this review. |
Cast down from on high by Eigong, leader of the then 10 Sols, our protagonist Yi finds himself trapped within the ever-expanding roots of the Fusang, the eternal roots that consume this world. After lying dormant for 500 years, Yi is finally awoken by a small child playing a flute, and after another year of rest and recovery, Yi can now begin his quest for vengeance in earnest. The player is not immediately privy to the particulars of the how and why of this quest, serving as the hook that dangles ahead to drive the action forward — something Nine Sols handles expertly.
The opening scenes of Nine Sols are quite effective at conveying so much information through so few words. From the very first conversation in the game, you come to understand — or at least get a sense of — Yi’s relationship to Shuanshuan and the people of Peach Blossom Village. We get a feel for how much those villagers respect Yi, and how much they care for one another. Further still, we can sense Yi’s frustration and hatred for the ones who have wronged him, and his desire to see them brought low. It is compelling, effective.
Publisher: RedCandleGames Developer: RedCandleGames Platform: Played on PC Availability: Released May 29, 2024, for PC (Steam); November 26, 2024 for Nintendo Switch, PS4/5, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One. |
Yet when handed the reins, the pull dissipates. The large gaps between the moments of genuine connection and emotion are inundated with collectibles and re-exploring the same rooms over and over, killing the same foes time and time again with no variation or surprise. Getting to the “True” ending of the game requires re-exploration of unchanging, unfeeling tedium, hiding satisfying narrative progression and character growth behind many “things” to do.
I’ve been thinking back to and re-reading Jake Steinberg’s essay We Are All Becoming More Thick, where he talks about the lengths people will go to make sense of the games they play by bringing in connections to other material and outside context. He speaks about how the evidence and explanations outside of a game are so often used to “thicken” the persuasiveness of the argument via the accumulation of information.
“At a certain point, the entire activity stops resembling dramatic experience altogether. The player becomes an archivist managing emotional evidence after the fact, endlessly thickening the structure surrounding scenes that never fully lived on their own.”
This is, unfortunately, how I have experienced much of Nine Sols. There is a certain benefit to being a game reviewer that often goes unexamined — the privilege of fresh experiences. When we get a game prior to release, we get to experience it unblemished by online discussion or talking points. We get to play the games a little more freely from expectation and discourse. Guides don't exist for games under embargo, so you just play the game in front of you. But that’s not how most people experience games. That’s not how I approached Nine Sols.
Algorithms on sites like Reddit would push topics about Nine Sols into my feed. I knew what people liked about the game, I saw the way it was spoken about on socials, and viewed short-form videos that explored the untold lore — all of which arrived at my feet without deliberate desire to do so on my end.
Step into one of these subreddits, and hundreds of people are waiting with bated breath to inform you of all the connections to mythology, all the little morsels of data you might have glossed over, and how these crumbs then make everything else work well when enough are accumulated. I felt very little of this in playing the game, yet I could not escape it.
Connections to the tales of Hou Yi and the Peach Blossom Spring are obvious to those in the know, but serve little purpose in understanding the actual events of this game. They feel about as closely connected as Son Goku and Sun Wukong in the moment — a cute reference that, once drawn upon, can be quickly discarded. Knowing that Nine Sols is a parallel to the tale of Hou Yi and the 10 suns is about as useful as knowing which Dragonball cast members reflect each specific Journey to the West personage — it is largely irrelevant to the thing at hand.
The game feels at odds with itself, trying to tell a more traditionally constructed story while also trying to appease the “lore sickos” of the world, hiding notes and piles of world-building in the background through its collectibles. These hidden nuggets of information rarely serve to further the story or stakes of the game in any meaningful way, providing little more than an accumulation of information that can then be collected, organized, and rattled off to explain more deeply how any of it mattered in the first place.
This stands in stark contrast to the cutscenes and character interactions throughout the game, which beautifully communicate character relationships, their ever-evolving goals, feelings, and their growth, all through gorgeously drawn and animated sprites and short dialogue sequences. All of it was thrown into the pot with the roux of information congealed through those paratextual readings and viewing.
In totality, Nine Sols is a game of few words, at least as the main story is concerned, but Yi’s personal quest for vengeance, and the softening or hardening of his convictions throughout, are borne out through our play. Which quests we do, how we complete them, and decisions on which characters you kill all play a part in the evolving experience of Nine Sols. Yet there is still this lingering tedium that must also be done, to read these bits of text here and there that don’t move anything forward and only rarely work to change our perspective.
This feeling is exacerbated by the overwhelming overreliance on parrying as the mechanism for both our offense and defense. Every enemy encounter requires a bit of patience to learn the enemies’ moves, to dial in on the timing required for parries so as to avoid damage from attacks, and then respond in kind. But with the large number of enemies and frequent re-exploration of the zones required for full game completion, the act and elation of parrying not only becomes rote, but descends further into monotony. An almost hypnotically boring repetition of the same button press patterns and timings across a few dozen hours.
I find this deeply unfortunate, because the character interactions at the base and within the cutscenes are meticulous and artful, and there’s purpose and power in the environmental design in each area. Beyond simple mystery, these things create an atmosphere that draws players in, wanting to learn a bit more about what happened, while communicating more than enough on their own to satiate over the course of the journey.
Additionally, the combat that begins to feel tired over the length of the game is tightly controlled and balanced. Parrying is fundamentally the most important aspect of every encounter in the game; the decisions on which techniques to use or how much aggression to apply in any given moment makes for some intense on-the-fly decision-making. The tension and triumph of success in boss fights are particularly noteworthy, with bosses having a multitude of unique attack patterns and gimmicks that players must contend with to move forward.
That tension and purpose are lost in the in-between when navigating the platforms and halls of Nine Sols. The smaller hordes feel much more like an annoyance than a true threat, as if they were simple time-wasters meant to drive you mad over the mundanity rather than actually harm you. Approaching them sleepily does come at a cost, however, with smaller enemies entirely capable of downing Yi in just a few attack strings on their own. It did not take long before I simply tried to avoid as many fights as possible so I could get to the “good stuff”.
And there’s plenty of good to go around. Aside from the aforementioned bosses, environments, and character interactions, the platforming is a lot of fun, as well. In fact, I found that by working to avoid enemies, the platforming and navigation were actually elevated. These would-be assailants are much more interesting as roadway hazards than they could ever hope to be as combatants.
Moving from space to space while jumping, dashing, and bouncing my way through environmental hazards and foes alike offered a frequently fast-paced and considered experience, serving as a nice change of pace over the more reflexive combat. It felt like a dance as much as the boss fights did, and learning how to move swiftly through each zone became something I looked forward to more and more as the game went on. Despite this, I could never shake the feeling that I was being pushed to do the more boring aspects quite heavily.
Upgrades locked behind finding those collectibles, map markers, and icons telling me exactly what I was missing at every turn, and even major story beats hidden behind the tedium of accumulation — all of it in service of gathering oats for my own porridge. If I got enough, surely I would be satiated. But I was satiated. I liked the bosses, the conversations, the environments, the visual style, and the mystery of it all as it pertained to the in-game events.
In this sense, the information was not “thickened” in the same way Steinberg speaks about in his essay. Rather than explainers trying to make sense of things that weren't there, the sequence of events leading up to the start of the game is overexplained, ensuring those who encounter the information have enough to work with to draw further connections and parallels beyond the text.
Steinberg writes,
“One explanation leads to another and then another. The archive keeps expanding. The game keeps improving somewhere else.”
Nine Sols is a game that wants to be archived. It wants players to find and draw these connections. It works tirelessly to ensure that each player knows that something more is going on here, and it utilizes the drive of the archivists to catalogue every line of information as justification for its existence.
These collectibles are not without their own merits in an aggregate sense. As pieces of the world they exist in, they do stand on their own. As opposed to many other games that hide lore in item descriptions, you will get the full picture of this self-contained story. That said, while they do flesh out the world more fully and provide history and context to it, they never felt hugely important in driving the action. Many contain repeat information, or asides that mean very little in the grand order of things — except to Yi himself.
Despite much of the information being things he already innately knows, Yi’s growth (and the ultimate resolution of his character arc) is entirely reliant on completing this menagerie. It was as if his epiphany could only come through the act of repetition itself. Truth discerned by wrenching away the mystique previously held. But I quite liked that mystique, and I wish I could have held onto it a bit longer before being thrust into the annals of the archives.
Verdict  |
Comments