Red Candle Games
2024
All Platforms

Like Nine Sols itself, I’m going to start by talking about Yi and Shuanshuan.

After Yi, our protagonist, is betrayed by his fellow Solarians, a child named Shuanshuan finds Yi revived in a cave outside his village. They develop a friendly, fraternal, paternalistic relationship offscreen – Shuanshuan is an orphan living in the “Apeman Village” (humans) who quickly takes to Yi as a “big bro” figure, who remains bemused and aloof. But when an annual ritual threatens to lead to Shuanshuan sacrificing himself, Yi intervenes and effectively ends the fiction of Shuanshuan’s world. The Apeman Village is a livestock farm – the ritual is submission to meat processing for the scientifically advanced Solarians.

Most games would play with this tension by driving friction between Yi and Shuanshuan, Yi trying to obscure the reality of exploitation from his “younger brother” for fear of repudiation and shame. But instead Nine Sols develops the relationship very differently – Yi takes pride in the opportunity to share his culture and technology with Shuanshuan, and Shuanshuan takes joy in learning new things. The tension isn’t completely abandoned, but Yi’s relationship with his adopted family is driven by a development of mutual love and respect rather than by a fear of loss.

Shuanshuan himself is written wonderfully as an independent child who quickly takes on creative projects with a sense of duty and willingness to practice. They do this without inflating his talent or hyperbolizing – he is a good artist for a young child, a decent musician for a young child, quick to learn games but slow to understand botany beyond “give the plant lots of nutrients.” He’s an upbeat little kid who occasionally surprises you with insight without being a perfect superchild. This is often very hard to write without getting annoying. I think they nail the prompt.

The relationship between Yi and Shuanshuan is the emotional core that drives arguably the best “search action” (Metroidvania) game since Hollow Knight. Yi explores caverns, laboratories, and factories to find the Solarians who betrayed him and set an end to their dystopian monoculture. The battles against these Solarians (more later) are some of the best conceived difficult boss fights in years. Red Candle Games describes Nine Sols as “Taopunk [which] blends cyberpunk/sci-fi elements with Taoism and Far Eastern mythology.” Both in story and gameplay, it is a far cry from their previous horror games Detention and Devotion. The latter of those games infamously ran afoul of repressive Chinese government policies around Xi Jinping, being taken off the market for several years. Nine Sols emerges as their first crowdfunding effort since.

Nine Sols’ action gameplay and combat is a pleasant surprise from a studio known mostly for first-person horror narrative. It is, to put it simply, the sister to Hollow Knight the people demanding Silksong are craving. Similarly to that game, as Yi’s moveset improves, the game becomes a dance of swift movement and quickly hotstepping through enemy encounters on your way to the next major destination. Unlike other games in the genre, the economy is not scaled to require any sort of grinding – simply exploring the map and fighting the enemies you run into along the way is going to be enough to unlock all the major upgrades offered to Yi. I was always happy to re-explore an area and recognize that there was no real need for me to fight my way through its guards.

The moment that it all clicks for me is the relatively early unlock of the mid-air parry, which the game calls the “Tai Chi Kick.” This is required for use against certain charged attacks, which can only be parried this way, and also for bouncing in the air on certain switches. The Tai Chi Kick is satisfying partly because it has no punishment for misuse – you exit it quickly enough to launch an attack, you do not have a wait imposed if you start it too close to the ground, and so the only goal is to time it correctly for your foes. This allows you to navigate the exploration sequences bouncing past your foes’ volleys with speed and grace, creating a pleasurable verticality I hadn’t anticipated. It also turns the game’s boss fights into a frantic and aggressive near-constant movement, maybe most comparable to the whirling attack of Yoda in the Star Wars prequels.  The ground parry is effective, but generally harder to time and more vulnerable to more attacks.  It is almost always safest to be midair, because in the air, you can use the Tai Chi Kick.

Thankfully, the game offers difficulty options – its intended Standard difficulty is for genuine experts of Hollow Knight and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, aimed at people who know how to master a parry system as well as midair combat movement. That’s well beyond my paygrade, and I bumped it down to Story difficulty while fighting the game’s first real boss. The default story mode sets the game’s difficulty closer to the start of Hollow Knight rather than the endgame, though it offers additional modifiers to set the scales to your liking. Not every game needs this! But if you’re going to set the standard difficulty to go beyond some of the harder games on the market now, I appreciate the decision, especially for a studio developing their first action game.

I enjoyed this game’s many bosses – the titular Nine Sols are also each engaging area bosses narratively, with appealing, memorable designs and personalities. Their frequent conversation with Yi gives the game more of a character-based narrative than the loneliness many search action games prefer – Animal Well is a useful comparison point, with zero dialogue at all and the other animals serving at best as neutral observers. Finding out the nature of New Kunlun’s dystopia is continually satisfying and keeps the narrative stakes moving during otherwise gameplay-forward sequences.

I also forgot to mention – this is one of the best looking works of animated cartooning in games in many years. The character designs are so charming and memorable and expressive. The use of color throughout the game is so bright and decadent. Attack animations are distinctive, cool as hell, and legible enough to react accordingly. I also love the game’s music, driving orchestral work that invokes an amalgamation of Asian influences to represent some degrees of cultural difference. Again, achieving something so aesthetically lush is especially exciting coming from Red Candle, whose previous games utilized retro aesthetics and spare lo-fi elements to create a sense of dread.

The game’s grand narrative tells a story of ambition for a scientific utopia crumbling against individual iniquity and shame. When the seams begin to show on an experiment, its supervisor pushes forward because they want to take pride in being the one to arrive at the solution. This either leads to a fascist indifference toward suffering or, just as often, the rising body horror of mutation gone wrong. The game contrasts this with memories of Yi’s younger sister, who is more spiritually attuned to their home planet Penglai. Red Candle is putting their chops to work in creating this undeniably Chinese riff on science fiction, the “Taopunk” label I hope one that continues to be explored alongside their work.

But alongside the bosses, the creeping horror, the study of an imbalance between spirituality and science, the thing that I found most rewarding and motivating in Nine Sols was finding a recipe book or an old VR headset and knowing I could bring it back to Shuanshuan to get another conversation with him. If there’s a biggest surprise to Nine Sols, it’s that a studio whose horror games were previously very painful and full of cruel fates and cruel people managed to tell the story of a relationship so full of joy and growth. There are monsters all around New Kunlun, slowly making their way toward Yi’s doorstep. But they can’t take that kid’s shine.