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Superb art style with a promising gameplay so far | Demo Review - Nine Sols
2K View2023-12-01
✨Overview
Nine Sols is an upcoming hand-drawn 2D action-platformer souls-lite, blending Oriental Asian culture and teachings, cyberpunk aesthetics, and Sekiro-inspired combat. The game is scheduled to release in early in 2024 for PC, Switch, and PlayStation, but I was able to play the Demo on Steam, and it looks really good. It’s a weird mix of ancient Asian mythology, and futuristic otherworldly cyberpunk elements. The developers eloquently refer to it as a Taopunk, combining both Taoism and Cyberpunk into one genre.
🎨Graphics and Art Style
🎨Graphics and Art Style
Nine Sols distinguishes itself with impressively detailed hand-drawn art and highly detailed sprite-based animations. The anime-style aesthetics, blending seamlessly with Japanese manga-inspired moving panels as cutscenes, create a rather surprising visually stunning experience. Honestly, the only thing missing for the presentation to be of top tier quality is to add voice lines, as this game only features text-based dialogue for everything. I’m not sure if this game will have voice-overs upon release.
📖Story and Premise
📖Story and Premise
The demo allows us a peek into the first 30 minutes of the game’s story so far. It follows our cat-looking hero Yi and his vengeful quest against the 9 Sols. The early parts of the game are set in a peaceful village called New Kunlun, with ancient-style technology and optimistic primitive humans living in it. From there, mystery upon mystery presents itself to the player and the character, infusing the lore with futuristic technology and depressing undertones. Not much is known beyond that and the game’s synopsis on Steam, but so far, it’s a very compelling story that left me wanting for more as soon as the Demo ended.
🎮Gameplay
🎮Gameplay
The gameplay seamlessly blends classic platforming mechanics with fast, brutal action sequences, making each encounter a thrilling experience. Move around like in a 2D platformer Metroidvania game, jump, climb, and dash to avoid hazards... or maybe deflect attacks with a well timed parry.
⚔️Combat
⚔️Combat
The combat in Nine Sols stands out as a Sekiro-lite experience, demanding precision and strategy. Players can slash, deflect, and utilize abilities to to engage enemies with Abilities like the Foo Charm in the demo, it’s basically a bomb that Yi places in his enemies in the heat of combat and explodes in stylish fashion. The boss fight in the demo is a pretty standard first boss for a souls-lite. I died a handful of times but each time was a learning experience until I was finally able to beat it convincingly. I can feel that the balance between challenge and satisfaction is there, except for a little bit of frustration with the controls.
🕹Controls
🕹Controls
While the controls are very responsive and failures are most often due to the player rather than the game, this is one of the few games that had my hands hurting, especially in just under an hour of play. The dash is bound to RT and it just felt wrong to me when combined with LB as deflect and RB as your Foo charm ability, Fortunately, the controls are remappable so I just swap dash (RT) and jump (A) and it was immediately more comfortable.
📊Technical Performance
📊Technical Performance
The demo ran well on my i7-8700k, RTX 3080 setup, performance is smooth as butter. Performance wise, I don’t think anyone with a decent PC should be worried if their PC can run it. Mobile phones can even easily run it too, which can always be a possibility if the game is a success. There were no crashes and as far as the Demo is concerned, it looks very polished already from the UI to the gameplay.
⚖️Conclusion
I was impressed by Nine Sols’ demo and it exceed far beyond my expectations, surpassing what I anticipated with the limited information I had before starting the game. The art style is terrific, the gameplay is definitely holds a promise in terms of being a 2D platformer with souls-lite / sekiro elements. So far, so good. I’m genuinely excited for the release.
Mix Taoism, Cyberpunk, Sekiro, and Metroidvania; you have this | Demo Impressions - Nine Sols
I was able to play a short Demo of Nine Sols, an upcoming 2D platformer with souls-lite and Sekiro elements. It's basically a mix of Taoism, Cyberpunk, Sekiro, and Metroidvania, resulting in a title that seems familiar and unique at the same time.
The gameplay seamlessly blends classic platforming mechanics with fast, brutal action sequences, making each encounter a thrilling experience. Move around like in a 2D platformer Metroidvania game, jump, climb, and dash to avoid hazards... or maybe deflect attacks with a well timed parry.
lyndonguitar9K2023-12-01
Cyberpunk 2077 meets Sekiro in this action-packed 2D platformer
SHOULD I PLAY NINE SOLS?
Play it. In its current demo version, Nine Sols offers less than an hour of great storytelling and fun hack-and-slash gameplay, but it’s totally worth the experience. While a few balancing issues need to be addressed before the full release, Nine Sols has become one of my most anticipated games for next year.
TIME PLAYED
I played Nine Sols for forty minutes, which was enough time to complete the entire demo, including one boss fight. The demo took me through most of the first chapter of the story, and I’m eager to see how the plot opens up from here when the full game comes out.
Jay Hunter2K2023-12-05
Nine Sols Demo Review: Combat, Exploration, and the Promise of a Grueling Journey
Nine Sols is a soulslike video game developed by RedCandleGames and published by RedcandleGames. In this review we will explore the lore heavy sekiro style demo and the various aspects like gameplay, graphics and sound and whether you should play or not.
The Gameplay of Nine Sols offers players a grueling 2D metroidvania with the deflect mechanic highly seen in the Sekiro Games. The mechanics are quite simple in nature as you have the deflect system, you can dash in between enemies attacks and The talismans which are almost guaranteed maximum damage upon explosion. Nine Sols does borrow a mechanic seen in bloodborne if you miss the parry you will take residual damage but by being aggressive you can regain the health back. The biggest mechanic is the parry system where there's the perfect parry which helps gain you chi to use your talismans and the missed parry which still parries the attack but you take residual damage. In between your run, you'll notice there's rest pods which help as your check point if you do die.
Chaotic Inc. 7322023-12-06
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