Nine Sols is an interesting game that uniquely blends cyberpunk technology and Eastern Taoist mythology into something truly beautiful. You play as Yi, a vengeful, cat-like warrior belonging to a powerful race known as the Solarians. Yi wakes up from a long slumber after being betrayed by his peers. These peers make up the council known as the Nine Sols. The Nine Sols rule over everyone and have exploited the race known as the Apemen. Now it’s up to Yi to stop the Nine Sons and free the Apemen.
The way that Nine Sols plays is that of a Metroidvania. What sets the game apart in it’s genre though is instead of focusing on hack and slash mechanics, it takes inspiration from games that came before it like Nocturna and Metroid Dread. This influence mainly being that of rhythmic, deflecting combat. Success depends entirely on mastering a high stakes parry system.This parry mechanic involves perfectly timed deflections to mitigate incoming damage and build up “Qi” charges.
These Qi charges are then unleashed via high damage talisman explosions. Outside of combat, exploration is traditional and deeply rewarding. The game constantly teases you with unreachable paths until you unlock standard genre traversal tools like a grappling hook, double jumps, and wall-running. Nine Sols is an unapologetically difficult game with huge and relentless boss fights that feel like complex dances. Thankfully it’s not game breakingly brutal as it does place respawn points immediately outside boss arenas to minimize the frustration that can come from backtracking.
Visually, Nine Sols is absolutely beautiful with its hand-drawn backgrounds and silky smooth animations of both characters and the enemies you face. The environmental design has you traversing through bright neon drenched cityscapes and lush, mystical grottos with it all being segmented by clinically sterile corridors. Performance wise, Nine Sols is great on Nintendo Switch. The gorgeous art style scales wonderfully to the smaller screen and targets a stable frame rate during intense combat encounters when playing in handheld mode.
When playing docked, the game looks just as good which surprised me. I was expecting the game to be stretched or look like a smudged up mess. Thankfully this is quite the opposite with Nine Sols. It looks great either way you decide to play it. The only real compromise you have when it comes to performance is the load times can be a bit long. Though this is thankfully it’s much less of an issue on Switch 2. While the game doesn’t feature an upgrade to Switch 2, it still loads a bit quicker on the newer hardware.
Nine Sols sounds just as good as it looks. The game combines traditional Asian instruments with modern electronic elements. This does well to re-enforce the aesthetic of blending cyberpunk with Asian mythology. Every blade clash, deflect, and explosive talisman blast lands with an incredibly crisp sound.
The music scales brilliantly, offering serene, meditative melodies when you visit the central hub, which dramatically give way to booming, heavily orchestrated arrangements during climactic fights. While the music found in this game isn’t necessarily something you would listen to outside of playing it, it’s still rather memorable and nice to listen to. It compliments the beautiful presentation of this game to the point it feels almost like art and not a game at all.
Before I conclude this review, I wanted to go over some aspects of the physical version of the game.
The standard edition of Nine Sols for Nintendo Switch features beautiful artwork on the front cover and some great stills of the action on the back. Aside from the standard cart you would expect with a physical release, this release also comes with two art cards and an instruction manual.
The art cards are double sided and feature artwork from the game that is really nice to look at and the cards themselves are made from a high quality card stock. While these cards are a nice addition, the highlight is of course the manual.
The manual offered in this physical edition of Nine Sols is small as one would expect but features six pages and is in full color. In it you will find a map that fills two of the six pages, two pages for the story, and pages that make up character, location, skills, and combat descriptions. There are also two pages dedicated for notes if you are someone that likes to write notes at the end of your game manual. As with the art cards, the manual is made really nicely and is of high quality. Definitely not something you see these days with modern releases, but still an awesome edition to this game and I am very happy that it’s included in the standard edition of this physical release.
Nine Sols stands out as one of the best modern Metroidvanias on the Nintendo Switch. While its steep, precision-based difficulty curve and minimal navigational hints may alienate casual players looking for a relaxed adventure, it is a masterpiece for those who enjoy overcoming steep gameplay challenges. Red Candle Games has crafted an incredibly unique setting and a combat loop that feels triumphant when conquered. Nine Sols is unapologetic and is a must play for fans of Metroidvania games!
Disclaimer: A review copy was provided
In addition to writing articles, Ryan Byers also creates content for his YouTube channel called "Obscure Games and Consoles", collects video games, and dabbles in video game development.