Nine Sols: The Sekiro Parry in a Taopunk Frame

Red Candle Games spent six years being known for two horror games and one international incident. Detention (2017) put White Terror-era Taiwan into a 2D side-scroller and got a Netflix series out of it. Devotion (2019) put a Taipei flat into first person, shipped with a piece of art mocking a head of state buried in a prop, and was pulled from Steam inside a week; the studio eventually re-released it through its own storefront in 2022. That is the reputation Nine Sols arrives against — a small Taipei team known for atmosphere, dread, and being difficult to buy.

Nine Sols, which came to PC on 29 May 2024 after a Kickstarter, is a 2D action game about deflecting. It is the least likely third act imaginable, and it is the best thing they have made.

The deflect is an investment, not attrition

Everyone will tell you Nine Sols is Sekiro in 2D, and everyone is right enough to be unhelpful. The comparison is worth making precisely, because the place where the two designs diverge is where Nine Sols becomes its own thing.

FromSoftware’s deflect in Sekiro is attrition. Every parry you land pushes an enemy’s posture bar up and holds it there; the fight is a slow crowbar applied to a gauge, and the reward for perfect play is that the gauge stops draining. Deflecting is how you survive. Damage is the by-product of surviving well enough for long enough.

Nine Sols hands you a different contract. Your protagonist Yi carries the Foo Talisman: land a deflect, and you stick a charge to the enemy. The charge sits there. It does nothing on its own. You detonate it with a separate input, and that is where the damage lives. The parry is a deposit. The detonation is the withdrawal.

That single split changes the emotional texture of every encounter. In Sekiro you are pressing forward through defence. In Nine Sols you are accruing — and the moment you notice you have three charges banked on a boss who is about to wind up something you cannot afford to interrupt, you have the specific, delicious anxiety of a man holding a full hand of chips at a table that might close. Greed becomes a mechanic. Do you cash out for a guaranteed chunk, or hold for one more deflect and risk eating the hit that wipes the ledger?

Then there is the Unbounded Counter, the charged answer to attacks marked in red that a normal deflect will not touch. It costs charge, it demands you hold the input through a window where you are committed, and it converts an unblockable into an opening. The red attacks are, in effect, the game asking whether you have been paying attention to the rhythm or merely surviving it.

Every one of those systems is a way of asking the same question: are you willing to stand closer than is comfortable? Nine Sols has no dodge worth the name in the FromSoftware sense; retreat is a losing strategy, and the game teaches this by making the rewards for proximity structural rather than cosmetic. It is generous with the lesson and merciless if you refuse it.

Why 2D is the right plane for this

There is a genuine engineering argument buried in Nine Sols, and it is the reason the Sekiro comparison flatters it.

Sekiro’s hardest problem is the camera. A deflect window measured in a handful of frames is a contract between the game and your eyes, and a 3D camera can break that contract without either party being at fault — a pillar intervenes, a boss steps behind you, the lock-on swings and you have lost the tell you needed. Every player who has bounced off a From game has a story that is really a camera story.

A 2D plane makes the contract enforceable. The tell is always legible. When Nine Sols kills you — and it will, repeatedly, and the second half is a step up that some players will find unreasonable — you know exactly which frame you got wrong. That legibility is worth more than any amount of tuning. It is the same reason Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown felt so clean in the same year: constraining the axis is a feature.

The older ancestor here is not any Soulslike at all. It is the 8-bit fighting game. I spent a genuinely stupid portion of 1987 on International Karate + on a C64, and the thing IK+ understood — the thing Barbarian and its stablemates understood — is that a fight staged on a flat plane at a fixed distance is a conversation about spacing and timing, with no third dimension to hide the information in. Nine Sols is that conversation with thirty-seven years of animation budget attached. Yi’s sword has weight because you can always see the gap.

The frame, and the word “taopunk”

Red Candle coined “taopunk” for this, and the marketing instinct is a bit groan-worthy until you actually look at the place. New Kunlun is a Solarian colony rendered in hand-drawn art that puts Taoist cosmology on top of decayed industrial infrastructure, and the combination is doing work rather than decorating. Cyberpunk’s usual grammar is Western corporate rot with a neon overlay. Nine Sols swaps the underlying philosophy out and the aesthetic reorganises itself around a different idea of what decline means.

Yi is one of the Nine Sols, awake after a long absence, hunting the other eight. The humans of New Kunlun are called Apemen and are treated roughly as you would expect a species to be treated when the people running the place regard them as raw material. The story is delivered in the Red Candle manner: patient, mostly environmental, unhurried about handing you the shape of it.

The build layer is jades — equippable modifiers you slot to shape Yi around your own bad habits. It is a light system by the standards of the genre, and I mean that as praise. The jades tune; they do not rescue. You cannot build your way out of failing to deflect, which is the correct decision for a game whose entire argument is that you should learn to deflect.

Where it fights itself

Two things.

The first is the difficulty step in the back half. Nine Sols is a game with a teaching curve of real elegance for its first stretch and a spike in its last that reads as the developers designing for the players who survived the first stretch. That is a defensible choice and a real cost, and anyone telling you the game is “fair throughout” is grading on the curve of having finished it.

The second is length. This is a fifteen-to-twenty-five-hour game with a platforming layer that is competent rather than inspired, and there are stretches of traversal between the combat set-pieces that exist because metroidvanias have traversal. The fights are where the design is thinking. The corridors between them are where it is filling.

Neither is fatal. Both are the kind of thing worth knowing before you commit twenty hours of your life, which is the only reason I raise them.

The verdict

Nine Sols is the rare homage that has an argument with its source. It took Sekiro’s central verb, worked out that the verb could be a currency rather than a gauge, and built a whole economy of greed on top of it — then staged that economy on a plane where you can actually see what you are doing. The result is a combat system that does something Sekiro does not: it makes you complicit in your own deaths. You did not fail to react. You held for one more charge.

That Red Candle got here from two horror games, via a delisting that would have ended a lesser studio, is the sort of career arc you do not get to see very often. Play it on PC. Give the first three hours the patience they ask for; the game is teaching you a verb, and it will not start speaking properly until you have it.

If you want the other end of the same year’s indie spectrum, the fifty-game argument of UFO 50 is worth your time next, and Signalis is the piece to read if what draws you here is Red Candle’s other register.

Spoilers below

Yi’s hunt has a shape you can see coming from a distance, and Nine Sols is comfortable with that. The revenge frame is a delivery mechanism for a question about what New Kunlun was for, and the answer — that the colony’s survival was engineered on top of the Apemen as a resource, with the Sols as the architects and Yi among them — recasts every fight you have had up to that point. You have been killing your colleagues over a decision you helped make.

The design consequence is the interesting part. The late bosses are the ones with the most personal claim on Yi, and the combat system’s greed loop lands hardest there, because the game has spent twenty hours training you to hold charges for one more deflect and the last fights are the ones where you most want it over quickly. The mechanic and the fiction end up asking the same thing: can you stand close to this a moment longer than is comfortable?

The Shuanshuan material — the small human boy Yi ends up responsible for — is the counterweight, and it is the reason the ending has any weight at all. Red Candle have always been better at the domestic scale than the cosmic one. Detention was a school. Devotion was a flat. Nine Sols is a colony, and the bit that works is still a kid asking for a story.