Superb art style with a promising gameplay so far | Demo Review - Nine Sols
33638857
✨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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Mentioned games
Comments
Be the first to comment.
