For all this shouts out Sekiro in its Steam summary, it's really Hollow Knight that's the clearest inspiration. The two-dimensional combat with an emphasis on verticality, directionality, and customizability are all Hollow Knight staples, even if the specific emphasis on parrying changes the character. That change represents a dramatic improvement: although Hollow Knight fights are enjoyable, they mostly boil down to positioning, while the interplay of parrying and the talisman mechanic makes Nine Sols fights more interactive as well as mechanically technical in a way I extremely enjoyed.
I definitely have some quibbles with the combat system—certain hitboxes just don't make sense, especially on the final boss, too many boss designs come too close to invalidating certain builds, and the "you can only parry the way you're facing" mechanic might not be intrinsically flawed but certainly lines up poorly with the way certain bosses are designed. But overall, the boss fights in particular are far and away the highlight of the game.
The rest of it is a bit more hit-or-miss. Although the map structure suggests a search action game, in practice it's so linear that it plays more like a level-based game: you go into a region, you fight the boss, it unlocks a movement mechanic that gets you into the single region that comes next. The platforming sections in many of the levels aren't bad so much as they are generic, like they could have come from any one of hundreds of indie puzzle-platformers. There are a few moments of interesting technical challenge, but nothing that comes close to what Hollow Knight offers.
The writing is broadly solid, but it never reaches the heights of either Hollow Knight's cheerful melancholy or the depths of Sekiro's tragedy. It's at its best when it's the least explicitly narrative, in the little character moments or Chiyou's whole vibe, which makes it kind of a shame that the overarching plot is told so much more explicitly than the games that inspired it.
The art is beautiful specifically in stills, but doesn't hold up as well in motion. The animations are just a little bit stilted, not enough to be unattractive but enough to be a noticeable contrast with the quality of the drawings. The best art is unquestionably the manhua-style interludes that follow each major boss fight, but these are all to brief and infrequent.
For all its flaws, Nine Sols has probably the best 2D side-on combat system I've seen, and it manages to capitalize on that much more than it doesn't. It's an impressive feat, particularly from a developer historically known for walking simulators. I hope to see them continue moving in this direction.
Reviewed on Jul 28, 2024