Nine Sols review

written 2025-01-25

Nine Sols is a metroidvania I played in 2025/01, since it was recommended by a Hollow Knight youtuber I watched. I found it quite good, my third favorite action rpg at the time of playing, after only Hollow Knight and CrossCode. My playthrough, with 100% completion, took 32 hours.

Combat

I heard Nine Sols described as "Hollow Knight meets Sekiro", which is accurate. It revolves around a deflect move that can block any attack with good timing, and also gives you a qi charge which can be used for special attacks. Its main flaw is that position doesn't matter much because it revolves so much around the invulnerable deflect. There's also an invulnerable dodge, but the later you get in the game the more it encourages you to rely on deflect instead. There's at first a type of enemy attack that can't be deflected, but even that goes away with the eventual unlock of an alternate deflect move that can deflect anything.

Mechanics that turn everything into timing

That said, I really appreciate how the deflect is enhanced with an intermediate possible outcome. If your deflect timing is a bit too early, you get a partial deflect, which has you take "internal damage" instead of real damage. Internal damage turns into real damage if you take real damage or heal, but otherwise heals itself over time. Not being limited to binary success/failure makes it much more bearable for a game to revolve around deflects, and internal damage can present some interesting decisions, like whether to try to avoid engagement until it heals, and whether to use one of your healing items knowing it'll lose the opportunity to heal the internal damage for free. It also adds design space for jades (an equippable upgrade system like the charms from Hollow Knight). There's a jade that makes it heal faster, a jade that makes it heal when you attack, a jade that replaces half the real damage you take with internal damage, and even jades that make you take internal damage when you attack enemies, in return for attacking much faster. I would love if more games had a mechanic like this.

The rules about internal damage could definitely be made clearer. It's confusing because internal damage can also be applied to enemies, but works differently for them: it only gets converted to real damage if you hit them with a talisman explosion.

Unlike many other 2D action platformers, there's no contact damage, but also *no invulnerability-on-hit*, which means you can easily be hit multiple times in quick succession. Most bosses do have fast multi-hit combos to capitalize on this weakness. This leads me to feel the mistake tolerance is a bit too low; most boss attacks kill you in 3-4 hits, but since you can take multiple very quickly, you can actually go from full health to dead in less than a second. There are also a few individual boss attacks that can hit for more than half your health. Unfortunately, the most damaging attacks also tend to be the most difficult to avoid.

Balancing section length and mistake tolerance

The healing system works like Sekiro as well, where you have a fixed number of heals, replenished only at saves, that require you to stand still for a second and can be interrupted. Most bosses don't give many healing opportunities. I can't count the number of times I tried to heal only for it to get me instantly killed. You really have to be careful with when you try to heal.

You also have a ranged attack with very scarce ammunition but it's powerful, piercing, and stuns enemies for a second. There are some interesting ways to use it. On one hand, you can save all its ammo for the last phase of a boss, so you don't have to face the harder phase for as long. You can also use it sparingly to interrupt specific attacks you find hard to avoid, or to create healing opportunities.

Enemy design

Enemy design is generally really good. Normal enemies in games like this don't have to be individually complex because they're meant to be fought in varied situations and in combination with others, but in this game many normal enemies have multiple behaviors anyway. Most bosses have a wide selection of moves that present interesting choices about when you want to try to attack or heal.

Difficulty

This game on standard mode is really hard, maybe the hardest action rpg experience I've had. Final boss took me 3 days of practice, and I had a max upgraded character.

Luckily, there's an easy mode, called "story mode", which just enables sliders that multiply incoming and outgoing damage. This makes for a very granular kind of difficulty setting, much like Celeste's assist mode, and if you start in standard mode you can switch to story mode without restarting your game, thankfully (though I didn't do so). There is no mode harder than standard, but I can't imagine needing one.

Progression

There is both grindable money and experience, though experience doesn't increase your stats as far as I know, only gives a skill point. Most upgrades come directly or indirectly from exploration. Some are for sale, but only after you've found certain items. This is nice because it places a minimum and maximum on how powerful you can be at a given point, so things don't get too unbalanced, and ensures that you don't have to grind much to get to the maximum.

No quantitative information

Unfortunately, as in most RPGs, you can't see quantitative information about abilities or items you're considering buying, making it mostly a matter of guessing.

Bloodstain system

It uses the Dark Souls bloodstain system, which sucks:

The Dark Souls bloodstain system SUCKS

As far as the specific implementation, it's worse than Dark Souls because there's no item you can use to warp out of a locked arena. It's also worse because when you're killed by a normal enemy, the death drop is attached to that enemy so you have to kill them to get it back. Luckily this doesn't apply to bosses or minibosses, who leave your death drop on the ground where you died.

On the other hand, it's better than Dark Souls because you can usually walk some ways into an arena without triggering it, so you can exfiltrate your death drop by picking it up, then intentionally dying right next to the entrance of the arena, leaving it close enough for you pick up on your next life without triggering the fight. Minibosses also don't have locked arenas, so you can more easily exfiltrate it from them. Still, this stuff is a chore to have to do, and very frustrating if you lose the death drop anyway. It happened to me once or twice.

You can also prevent losing death drops by using a certain jade that lets you survive the first time you take lethal damage, and immediately pausing and quitting to menu once it triggers. When you load you'll be back at your save point with the death drop still out there and have another chance to retrieve it. If you actually do die on the way to your death drop, you can quickly close the game before it saves your death. That worked for me once.

Boss treks

When it comes to time needed to get from a save point back to a boss arena, it's often pretty bad for minibosses, about 30 seconds. Okay, that actually isn't much by the standards of Souls-like games, but it feels worse here because 30 seconds is often many times longer than my attempt at the boss. But major bosses always have save points very close.

Level design

During exploration, platforming is mixed with combat beautifully. Not only are there fights among platforms, but there's also often a combination of ground enemies, flying enemies, ranged enemies, static turrets, and environmental hazards. There are some really good levels with dynamic arenas, like the warehouse zone with crates moving on paths that go both sideways and vertical, with different sides of them safe to touch: some you can stand on, other you can cling to the sides of.

There are some bad levels too. There's the prison breakout level, where you don't have most of your abilities, which necessarily makes the game less interesting, and there are several dark levels, where you can only see a small radius around your character. You have a little scout drone you can deploy to look around, but that's very tedious.

Fast travel QoL

The fast travel system has an annoying and pointless limitation. You can warp from your home base to any spawn point, and from any spawn point to your home base, but not between spawn points that aren't your home base. So you have to do a two-step process going through two long animations and loading screens to do that.

Boss fakeout victories

There are a lot of these - bosses with surprise extra phases after you think you've killed them. Once I realized this I started checking each boss's wiki page before I fought them, but I accidentally read some spoilers doing that, so I'll list here how many phases each major boss has:

Yingzhao - 2
Goumang - 1
Xingtian - 1
Yanlao - 2
Kanghui - 3 (but you only have to empty half his health each time)
Jiequan - 2
Lady Ethereal - 3
Ji - 2
The Fengs - 2
the final boss - 2 or 3 depending on story choices

Story

It is by far the best story I've seen in an action platformer. I cried over it. Its main virtue is the depth of the characters. Throughout the game, a few side characters get added to your base, and they have new conversations available regularly. Their interactions are always fun to watch, ranging from cute to hilarious to deep, but what really gets me is the relationships that develop among the characters from these interactions, and the way their stories end.

The lore is a bit confusing. I had to watch a video after I finished the game to complete my understanding, but at least I had the big picture from playing the game; it's not told in a completely implicit way like Dark Souls and Hollow Knight. And it is a good lore.