CHENNAI : Someone once told me that they noticed I only ever disliked games that I wasn’t very good at. I am a bit embarrassed to confess that they weren’t entirely wrong. There are a few games where the mechanics violently fight against my instincts. A good example is souls-like games, which are combat-focused, requiring a lot of patience.
They do not reward you for bumbling straight in with a sword. I’m conscious that timed combat does not come naturally to me and have genuinely been trying to get better at them. I played Nine Sols last week and think this might be one of the very few “super-difficult” 2D action-platformer games I’ve played that didn’t have me kicking and screaming in frustration.
Nine Sols is very cyberpunk coded, and I play as a cat called Yi. He isn’t your average cuddly kitten, like the one from Stray. Who is he then? Yi, is a high-ranked official from an alien species called the Solarians, who use humans as dispensable resources to power their technology. Yi smokes a pipe to recover his energy. Yi slashes hurt enemies five times as big as him. He is quite scary.
Now the background. Yi was in a fight, he is badly hurt, and thrown into the realm of the humans. Shuanshuan, a young human boy, nurses him back to health. As matters would have it, Yi now has a change of heart when it comes to humans. He eventually returns to his home to deal with some urgent matters, only to find it in a state of chaos. The game starts with Yi arming himself towards defeating (or gaining the favour of) 9 “sols” in the Solarian realm, to bring it back to its past glory… and maybe doing things a little differently this time.
All this lore is a veil — obscuring the challenging combat behind it. I’ve heard the word “souls-like” being thrown around a lot to describe this game — and that’s a stretch. Challenging combat and lost progression at death does not make a game a “souls-like”. Nine Sols is best described as a Metroidvania type. It is a 2D platformer game with a huge map, progression that is gated by a boss fight, and character abilities that are acquired over time.
Where it changes from a typical action platformer is in combat — which is almost exclusively structured around the parry or counter-attack movement. This makes the game quite challenging. You see, a parry requires me to very consciously place Yi in harm’s way, and time a defense exactly when the enemy attacks. Half a second too late, or too early, and the battle is lost.
There is really no getting around the parry mechanic. A more traditional combat game would allow multiple combat styles, including some skill trees that would allow someone like me to focus on improving attacks. But the skill tree in Nine Sols mostly only improves the outcomes of the parries, rather than shifting outside of that play style itself. I don’t mean that this is bad, it’s just the whole point of the game, and it makes it inconvenient for me.
What kept me going then? The story and the cut scenes are beautiful, and they play out like pages from a graphic novel. I pay my dues of a hundred deaths to mini bosses, just to learn a little more about Yi’s past. I run past slimy green snakes, lose my way several times and spend hours circling the same routes, in the hope of finding little trinkets to bring to Shuanshuan. He would like them. I spend hours mastering boss fights, hoping that the next ability that unlocks would be a double-jump.
Nine Sols is probably not meant for a beginner, but wouldn’t it be great if it was? Mastering the parry just felt so satisfying. It’s completely changed the way I think about combat in games and might have given me the confidence to play an actual souls-like game. Nine Sols is currently available on Windows and MacOS, and is best played with a controller. It is priced at Rs 1,300 on the Steam store.