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dkirschner's Nine Sols (PC)

[June 24, 2025 06:53:53 AM]

Retiring this one (and Sekiro). I was really into Nine Sols for a while, but, like Sekiro, it's like beating my head against a wall, agonizing for hours to make inches of progress. Nine Sols is a Sekiro-like metroidvania, Sekiro-like because it features incredibly difficult parry-based combat. I am learning that this may not be my cup of tea. It's too bad because I enjoyed the metroidvania aspects and think this is a much better game than the last metroidvania I played, Ender Lilies (which I thought was solid). Nine Sols is more like Hollow Knight, but with that Sekiro influence.

The story immediately hooked me. It feels like slow-burn sci-fi. Your character gets pushed off a cliff, wakes up when a village boy finds him, and lives for a time in this village. The village does periodic ritual sacrifices, but when the boy who finds your character is ready to be sacrificed, your character pulls a plot twist and, short version, the village is not what you think it is. Off you go on a quest to defeat the "nine sols" and...do whatever it is that does.

I killed two of them and I feel like I was close to finding one or two more. The two sols I killed were HARD, but such good, unique fights. In the second one, you fight this cat-harpy (all the sols are cats) and her two enslaved humans. One human is quick and the other is slow, but both are strong, and you fight them at the same time. When you empty one of their HP bars, the sol descends to heal them, at which point you can attack her. But while you're taking advantage of your window to attack her, the other human is still coming at you. Rinse and repeat this until she is dead. The strategy lies in how you choose to deactivate the humans. Do you focus on taking out the big one or the small one? Which one is less dangerous when you are attacking the sol? Or, do you try to deactivate them both at the same time, thus giving you free time to attack the sol? Or, what I finally got good at was staggering them, so I'd try to take down both their HP, then deactivate one, attack the sol, then when she was done healing it, immediately deactivate the other so she came right back. When I finally killed her, I thought the fight would go into a second phase because that's what happened with the first boss, I spent a long time killing it, but when I thought it was over, it just went into phase 2!

I loved the hard-as-nails boss fights, but the regular enemies were brutal as well! I died countless times to archers, dogs, swordsmen, spearmen, little guys, big guys, everything. Nine Sols does the Dark Souls / Hollow Knight thing where when you die, you drop your money, or if an enemy kills you, then they have your money. Then you have to make your way back there WITHOUT DYING to retrieve it. But the enemies are so vicious, and the platforming is challenging too, that it's quite the feat to make the (sometimes long) trek back to your corpse. So, you lose your hard-earned cash all the time. And you need that to purchase upgrades. And if you are avoiding enemies too much, then you're not getting experience points, so no skills improve either. I wanted to learn enemy attack patterns so that I could effectively parry and kill them, but it was such a slow death-filled process for every enemy type (of which there are many), including the various elites you encounter.

Nine Sols does have some cool innovations. For one, you have a "talisman" that lets you do this attack where you sprint past an enemy, attach a bomb, and detonate it. This converts all internal damage to permanent damage. What is internal damage, you say? Well, that's like temporary damage. Your character takes internal damage when you parry but miss the perfect timing, which is nice. Internal damage refills over time. So, you can miss a perfect parry, take internal damage, and recover it. Of course, if you take too much internal damage, you'll still die, and if you get hit while you have internal damage, then it converts to permanent damage. Enemies do the same thing, so using your talisman when they have internal damage can really deplete their HP. Another thing I liked was this butterfly drone thing you have. If you press LT, you take control of the drone and can fly it around. This is really useful for scouting ahead so you can see what enemies there are, what platforming obstacles there are, etc. The drone can also fly into special spaces and hack electronics to open doors and whatnot. On the one hand, stopping to use a drone to scout ahead of you all the time slows the pace down a lot, but on the other hand, caution is really important.

In the end, I don't have the time or patience to dedicate to mastering Nine Sols (or Sekiro), as much as I like it. Therefore, it is retired (as is Sekiro)! Although I did read that if you change the difficulty to story mode, you can manually adjust damage dealt and received (to the tune of +/- %1,000!), so maybe one day I'll god mode my way through just to see more of the game.