In December 2024, The Game Awards handed out trophies to the year’s best games. Nine Sols — a hand-drawn Metroidvania with a parry system unlike anything else in 2D action gaming, a Taopunk aesthetic drawn from Chinese mythology, and over 40,000 Steam reviews at 94% positive — received zero nominations.
That single data point tells you everything about 2024’s most overlooked game. Not that Nine Sols was bad: Game Rant documented its OpenCritic average at 86/100 with 96% of critics recommending it. It’s that 2024 was so stacked, and Nine Sols so perfectly timed to fall through every crack, that it landed without the recognition it earned.
We’re in May 2026. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 proved parry mechanics can carry a turn-based RPG to mainstream acclaim. Elden Ring Nightreign continues to define what punishing action games look like at their ceiling. And Nine Sols sits quietly in the background, still the game with more parry depth than either of them. This is the case for why it deserves to be remembered as one of the best games of its era — and why 2026 is your best argument for finally playing it.
The Parry System Nobody’s Actually Talking About
When people compare Nine Sols to Sekiro, they usually mean it as shorthand: hard game, parry-focused, you’ll die a lot. That framing undersells what Red Candle Games actually built.
Sekiro gives you one parry type. Nine Sols gives you four.
The base parry operates on a 0.133-second precise window — tighter than Sekiro’s, where an imprecise parry costs posture but not health. In Nine Sols, a mistimed parry deals 50% of the attack as internal damage, shown as a red overlay on Yi’s health bar. Community analysis confirms the key mechanical distinction: in Sekiro, sloppiness costs progress; in Nine Sols, it stacks a health debt that compounds across a multi-phase boss fight.
The Tai-Chi Kick provides an aerial parry that works in any direction. Where ground parries require Yi to face the attack, being airborne removes that restriction entirely — a design decision that opens up positioning options unavailable in Sekiro’s grounded system. The Focused Parry, unlocked mid-game, specifically counters unblockable red attacks that no dodge or basic parry can stop. And the Unbounded Counter demands pre-emptive commitment: hold block to charge, release at the right moment, wait too long and you whiff the entire defense.
Then there’s the talisman system, which is what makes Nine Sols genuinely original. Every successful parry charges a Qi slot. Once charged, you attach a paper talisman to the enemy, then detonate it — converting accumulated internal damage into permanent direct damage in a single explosive burst. GINX TV identified this loop as the mechanic that stays with players long after completion: your failures become strategic ammunition, not just a damage countdown.
This is what gets flattened to “it’s like Sekiro” in most coverage. It’s a combat system that took Sekiro’s foundation and built a second structural layer on top of it — one where every parry decision carries both immediate defensive and long-term offensive consequences.
Boss Fights Built to Test Every Layer
The parry system earns its complexity through the boss roster. Nine Sols has ten major encounters, and the back half of that list is elite design by any standard.
Lady Ethereal uses phase-shifting clone mechanics: multiple copies swarm Yi with attacks, but only the real Ethereal needs to be parried to stagger her. The critical discovery — attaching a talisman to the real version freezes all clones — shifts the fight from reactive panic to deliberate read-and-punish. Nine Sols teaches you this entirely through the fight itself, no tooltip required. It’s the kind of mechanical revelation that defines memorable boss encounters.
Eigong is the capstone. The hardest boss in the game and the fairest: her second phase introduces slashing waves, crimson shockwave eruptions, and multi-hit combo strings where the Unbounded Counter is specifically required. Basic parries don’t cut it here. The fight demands the full vocabulary of the combat system you’ve spent the previous twenty hours developing. Lords of Gaming rated Nine Sols 9/10 and called the boss fights “outstanding” — Eigong is specifically why that word applies.
Early mid-bosses are oversized regular enemies that feel perfunctory against what comes later. That’s a genuine pacing criticism. But by the time the difficulty ramps into its final stretch, Nine Sols delivers boss encounters that match the mechanical depth they’re designed to test.
A Story That Earned Its Best Narrative Award
Red Candle Games built Nine Sols after two acclaimed psychological horror titles — Detention (2017) and Devotion (2019) — both dealing with repression, trauma, and Taiwanese cultural identity under authoritarian pressure. Nine Sols represents a genre shift, not a tonal one. This is still a studio that treats narrative as structurally load-bearing.
Nine Sols is set in New Kunlun, a world described as “Taopunk” — a term Red Candle coined to describe a fusion of Taoism and cyberpunk. The mythology draws on Hou Yi, the divine archer of Chinese legend who shot down nine of the ten suns. Yi, the protagonist, is the last human-like being in a world now ruled by the nine Sols who replaced humanity. The lore isn’t ambient and implicit in the way Hollow Knight’s is — it’s told directly, in complete sentences, through cutscenes and dialogue exchanges that stop the combat.
Yi starts as a snarky anti-hero. His relationship with Shuanshuan — a child he encounters early in the game — becomes the emotional anchor that rounds out his arc over the full runtime. The payoff is earned through accumulated interaction rather than exposition dump. Nine Sols won Best Narrative at Indie Game Award 2024, an award the development team described as unexpected. It shouldn’t have been. The writing earns it.
Some reviewers note the dialogue-heavy flashback sequences slow the middle-third pacing. That’s accurate. It’s also the trade-off for a story that has genuine things to say about cyclical violence, sacrifice, and what it costs to protect something. If you engage with it, the ending lands harder than almost anything else from its year.
Why Nine Sols Fell Through the Cracks in 2024
The timing was the specific killer. Nine Sols launched May 29, 2024 — exactly one month before Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, an expansion that consumed the pre-summer conversation about action RPGs. Inverse described Nine Sols as overlooked by players gearing up for the latest From Software challenge — which is almost comically precise timing for a parry-focused game competing for the same audience.
Console players didn’t get a version until November 26, 2024, when Nine Sols launched on PS4/5, Xbox, Switch, and Game Pass simultaneously. By then, year-end GOTY discourse had already calcified around a different set of titles. The Game Awards gave Nine Sols zero nominations in any category — a result that generated coverage in indie circles but remained a secondary story behind UFO 50’s similar snub. The game that finished 2024 with 96% of critics recommending it on OpenCritic never had a platform to make that case to a mainstream audience.
None of this reflects the game’s quality. It reflects a release calendar so packed in 2024 that genuinely exceptional work disappeared in the noise.
In 2026, the Case Is Even Stronger
The landscape has shifted in Nine Sols’ favor. Parry mechanics are no longer a niche preference confined to Sekiro veterans — Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 built its entire RPG combat identity around timed deflection and proved the philosophy scales to mass-market audiences. The genre confirmed what Nine Sols already demonstrated in 2024: parry systems aren’t punishing for their own sake. They give players genuine agency in moment-to-moment decisions and make every fight feel consequential.
Nine Sols delivers this at a depth level Clair Obscur doesn’t reach. Four parry types, a talisman conversion loop that weaponizes accumulated defensive mistakes, boss designs built specifically to test each mechanical layer. The claim that Nine Sols had “every Soulslike of 2024 beat” in its swordplay — made at launch by The Gamer — looks more defensible from 2026 than it did eighteen months ago.
The game is on Game Pass across all platforms. Story Mode exists for players whose primary interest is the Taopunk narrative rather than the full parry learning curve. If you’re working through Elden Ring Nightreign and finding the combat satisfying, Nine Sols is the natural next step — sharper timing demands, more mechanical layers, and a narrative that FromSoftware games deliberately refuse to provide. For everything you need before you start, our complete Nine Sols guide covers the full system breakdown and boss strategies.
The only question is whether it gets the attention it always deserved.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Nine Sols harder than Sekiro?
For parry timing, yes — the precise window is 0.133 seconds and a mistimed parry deals 50% of the attack as internal damage. Sekiro’s imprecise parry costs posture, not health. That said, Nine Sols’ talisman system adds strategic flexibility absent from Sekiro: accumulated internal damage is convertible to burst offense, which means recoverable mistakes carry offensive weight rather than just penalty. Story Mode also provides reduced consequences for players whose priority is the narrative over mechanical precision.
Why wasn’t Nine Sols nominated at The Game Awards 2024?
No official reason was given. The most credible factors are timing (one month before Shadow of the Erdtree dominated mid-year attention), initial PC-only availability limiting audience breadth before the November console launch, and an exceptionally competitive 2024 indie field. UFO 50 received similar treatment and generated more mainstream debate; Nine Sols was part of the broader conversation about TGA selection criteria rather than an isolated case. The result — a game with 96% critics recommended finishing the year without a single nomination — remains one of the more difficult outcomes to rationalize.
What’s the best way to start Nine Sols in 2026?
Game Pass is the lowest barrier to entry across all platforms. Soulslike veterans should start on standard difficulty — the first three bosses are structured as a tutorial for the mechanics the later game demands, and the parry system’s depth only reveals itself under real pressure. If the Taopunk narrative is the primary draw, Story Mode removes the punishing consequences while preserving the full story. Either way, check our guide to games like Nine Sols for where to go after you finish.
Sources
- Game Rant — Nine Sols’ Controversial Game Awards Snub Explained
- The Gamer — Nine Sols Review: A Fur-midable Metroidvania With Purr-cise Gameplay
- GINX TV — Nine Sols: A Near-Perfect Fusion of Hollow Knight and Sekiro
- Lords of Gaming — Nine Sols Review: A Near Masterpiece Metroidvania
- Inverse — 2024’s Most Overlooked Action Game Just Landed on Xbox Game Pass
- Steambase — Nine Sols Reviews (40,404 reviews, 94% positive)
- Steam Community — Nine Sols General Discussions: Parry comparison thread
I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.