Nine Sols is $12 on Steam through May 18, and that price matters because this is one of the few soulslikes to earn a 92% review score from PC Gamer—a threshold reserved for games that are genuinely compelling recommendations rather than genre comfort food. At roughly 20 hours for a full run, you're paying less per hour than a movie ticket for what many consider the definitive non-FromSoftware take on Sekiro's deflection-driven combat. The sale ends soon. The real question is whether its specific flavor of hard action matches your tolerance for precision demands and narrative density.
The Combat Loop That Actually Defines the Game
Most soulslikes borrow the bonfire-to-boss structure and call it a day. Nine Sols instead reverse-engineered Sekiro's posture system and built an entire platforming framework around it. You parry everything. Projectiles, sword strikes, charging beasts, environmental traps—your primary interaction with danger is a well-timed button press that converts enemy offense into your opening. Miss the window, and you eat damage that heals slowly and punishes greed.
Here's the non-obvious part: the game wants you to play aggressively, but it punishes panic. There's a talisman system that rewards consecutive successful parries with escalating damage buffs, yet breaking your streak resets the multiplier entirely. This creates a rhythm where the safest defensive option (parrying) also feeds your highest damage potential. You're always one mistimed press away from losing both health and your accumulated power.
The platforming compounds this tension. Nine Sols isn't a linear corridor fighter. You're exploring New Kunlun, a sprawling 2D map with Metroidvania gating, and the same parry window applies to hazards in the environment. Spiked crushers, energy beams, falling debris—all deflectable, all demanding the same mental load as boss attacks. This means your combat skill and your traversal skill aren't separate tracks. They bleed into each other constantly.
Where players bottleneck: early bosses teach you to parry on reaction, but mid-game encounters require predictive parrying based on audio cues and startup animations you haven't fully internalized. The difficulty spike at the third major boss breaks many runs because the game stops telegraphing slowly. If you're struggling there, the shortcut isn't leveling—it's spending 30 minutes in the practice room accessible from your hub, which most players miss because it's hidden behind a dialogue option with an NPC who seems decorative.
What to Focus First: A Priority Order That Skips the Traps
New players consistently over-invest in health upgrades and under-invest in chi capacity. This is backwards. Chi fuels your healing, your special attacks, and your movement abilities. More health without more chi means you're healing less frequently and less efficiently, which actually extends fights and increases error exposure.
| Priority | Upgrade Path | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chi capacity to 3 bars | Enables full heal + one special in clutch moments |
| 2 | Parry window talisman | Forgiving without removing the skill requirement |
| 3 | Specific boss-killer talismans | Swap loadouts per encounter, don't generalize |
| 4 | Health | Only after chi supports your survival loop |
The talisman system is where build expression lives, and it's where most misconceptions fester. You can equip multiple talismans, but their effects don't always stack cleanly. Some create anti-synergies—damage-on-parry talismans conflict with healing-on-parry options because they compete for the same trigger window. The game never explains this explicitly. You learn by watching your numbers or by testing in the practice dummy room.
Story progression is tied to exploration, not just boss kills. Key abilities unlock areas retroactively, but the map marks unreachable zones clearly. The efficient path is to fully clear each accessible area before moving forward, not because of level gating—Nine Sols doesn't have traditional leveling—but because NPCs in those areas give you talismans and chi upgrades that trivialize upcoming fights. Skip exploration, and you're voluntarily entering hard mode.
The Trade-Offs Nobody Talks About
Nine Sols commits to being a complete package, and that completeness carries friction. The narrative is dense, voiced in a constructed language with subtitle reliance, and paced deliberately between combat challenges. If you're here purely for the Sekiro-like boss rush, the story segments will feel intrusive. If you're here for Red Candle's horror-tinged storytelling—their pedigree from Detention and Devotion—you'll find the combat difficulty gates your narrative access in ways their previous games didn't.
The specific asymmetry: boss quality is remarkably consistent, but the journey between them varies wildly. Some platforming sections are masterclasses of environmental design. Others feel like padding, repeating hazards you've already mastered without introducing new wrinkles. The game is roughly 20 hours, but that runtime includes maybe 3-4 hours of traversal that doesn't meaningfully test your skills. It's not enough to ruin the experience. It's enough to notice.
Multiplayer doesn't exist. No co-op, no invasions, no message system. For some, this is purity. For others, it's loneliness. The game assumes you'll talk about it online or you'll suffer in private. There's no middle ground.
Controller is strongly recommended. Keyboard parry timing is technically possible but demands frame-perfect precision that analog triggers make more forgiving. If you're a mouse-and-keyboard purist, add artificial difficulty to your mental calculation.
Conclusion
Buy Nine Sols at $12 if you want combat that respects your ability to learn patterns and punishes your assumption that you've mastered them. Skip it if you need narrative flexibility—this game tells its story on its schedule, not yours—and skip it if you lack a controller or the patience to fail at the same boss twenty times before the pattern clicks. The one thing to do differently: treat the practice room as mandatory infrastructure, not optional side content. Every hour spent there saves three hours of frustrated boss attempts later, and that ratio holds from the opening areas through the final encounter.
