It’s been almost a month since I decided how I was going to tackle my Best of 2025 listicle, but I’m only now realizing that will preclude me from mentioning Nine Sols. It was released last year, which would disqualify Nine Sols since I wanted to focus on only games that were released in the past calendar year.

However, there’s a more meaningful, to me at least, reason for why I wanted to mention Nine Sols as one of the stand-out experiences for me in 2025: it’s a game I was originally wrong about. Let me explain.

Keen eyed readers, or those of you with particularly adept memories will remember that I first covered Nine Sols in my Month in Review for December 2024. It was the very last game that I rolled credits on last year, and I was left with a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

On one hand, I loved the trance-like feeling that I achieved whenever I finally bested each of the game’s titular 9 Sols. All 8 boss fights are extremely punishing, but not in a way that feels condescending. Instead, it felt like the game wanted me to learn the specific cadence of the fight, so I could play it back in perfect harmony. In this way, Nine Sols felt akin to a Rhythm game as opposed to the Character Action games that it shares several surface level similarities to.

That said, I have seldom been so routinely frustrated by a game. I am not good at Rhythm games. I don’t even know if I qualify as bad at them either. We need a whole other word to describe my inability to keep time: kerfunkle. I am kerfunkle at Rhythm games. It’s part of why I bounce off basically every Rhythm game so fast it’d make your head spin.

As such, having an entire game’s combat system ostensibly revolve around keeping in-time with the rhythm of a fight was just…uggggggggh. And then once you learn one pattern, you have to learn another. And another. AND ANOTHER. It just won’t stop.

For these reasons, Nine Sols dodged inclusion in my Best of 2024 listicle. I enjoyed it well enough for what it was, but there were far too many times where I was driven to madness while playing it. 

It’s also worthwhile to mention that I didn’t have months to digest my experience, and eventually conclude that it was a net positive like I did with Rain World. Hence why Rain World received an honourable mention where Nine Sols did not, despite both games driving me absolutely bonkers while I was working my way through them.

However, I’m sure that long-time readers will already know that Nine Sols did, in fact, plant itself deep in my mind. I say this because I wrote a series of guides a few months later detailing how to systematically disassemble each of Nine Sols’ different bosses.

That is not the kind of thing you pull out of your ass on a whim. Rather, it’s the kind of thing you slowly chip away at across several weeks of work.

Though, crucially for our story, this whole escapade forced me to replay Nine Sols, which I expected to be a nightmare. I’d already slogged my way through this fucking game once, and now I was going to have to do it again? What was I thinking?

Except, that’s not what happened. It wasn’t a slog to play through Nine Sols a second time. In fact, I beat the game in less than half the time it took me to finish my first playthrough. That came despite the fact that I was intentionally throwing – failing on purpose – against the majority of the bosses, so I could capture multiple fights worth of recorded footage to use within my guide.

I was absolutely dancing on this game.

Previously, every single victory was painstakingly won through attrition and perseverance, but now…I knew exactly what Nine Sols expected of me. As such, I was performing my role with a near perfect cadence. Each strike, parried. Every projectile, deflected. Every opening, seized with a counter attack.

I’d finally internalized all of my steps for the dance through repetition, and could perform them in unison with each of Nine Sols’ different bosses.

While it was a really meaningful experience, I think the thing that I appreciated more about this second playthrough was how it opened my eyes to the finer details of Nine Sols’ design. Going through every boss fight with a fine-toothed comb gave me a much better idea of how, and why each fight was constructed in the way that it was. Instead of looking upon the different spikes in difficulty as cruel and unusual punishment, I now recognized them as moments where the developers were trying to help the player to hone their abilities for later fights.

As a quick example, Jiequan is the first fight where players need to use the secondary Unbounded Counter instead of just standard parries. This is a huge adjustment, but learning to use Unbounded Counters makes Ji, The Fengs (featured below), and Eigong substantially easier fights. Especially those latter 2. The Fengs, and Eigong are basically a different fight altogether if you’re not able to bust out Unbounded Counters when appropriate.

Unfortunately, this revelation has left a bit of a stick in my craw. That is, it’s not something that I want to accept as being the wholly positive experience that it most assuredly was. There’s 2 reasons for that:

Firstly, it means there was a game that I ought to have highlighted last year, but chose not to. Indie games already have a hard enough time getting noticed, regardless of their level of quality. Nine Sols, as it would turn out, was an exceptionally crafted game, and I just…didn’t say much of anything about it.

That sucks. There’s no other way to cut it.

I didn’t “get” it when I played Nine Sols for the first time. It took a second playthrough for me to experience the game in the way I believe the developers intended. Instead of every fight feeling like an insurmountable struggle, I was sailing through each boss in what almost appeared like a choreographed dance. I was demonstrating the same level of prowess that Yi, the game’s protagonist, is said to possess. It just took an entire playthrough of Nine Sols before I developed that proficiency for myself.

The second, and arguably worse revelation though is almost like an intrusive thought clawing at the back of my mind: how many other games was I wrong about? You could always argue the subjective merits of an individual’s experience while playing a game. Heck, I’ve done as much in previous articles.

What I’m really worried about are the games that only truly reveal themselves during those secondary playthroughs. The games that take time to grow on a person, and need a gestation period before I finally “get” them. Things like Nine Sols, or when I replayed Fire Emblem Awakening on Lunatic difficulty earlier this year. How many more of those am I passing by without realizing it? How many games could I be completely enamoured by if I just gave them a little more time?

I don’t know. I realize that’s a very unsatisfying way to answer that question, but I truly do not know. Nor do I have a plan to make sure that something like Nine Sols doesn’t happen again.

All I can do is my best. And in this specific scenario my best is telling you that I think Nine Sols is a brilliant game. My original assessment of it totally undersold exactly how compelling each, and every one of Nine Sols’ bosses are to finally best, doubly so if you run the whole game back after you roll credits on your first playthrough.

My best is also making a point of correcting myself when I believe I’ve made a mistake. I do like to maintain some air of integrity here even though I’m (realistically) not beholden to anyone. That’s why I disclose whenever I receive review codes, or even when a developer reaches out to me via email before I cover their game. I want to be as transparent as possible, so that I can maintain trust with you, the reader.

Anyway, that’s my piece on Nine Sols. It’s a great game, even though it likely drowned amongst the tsunami of other excellent releases that punctuated the whole of 2024. If anything that I’ve said here has piqued your interest then you should give it a looksie. And remember: Nine Sols takes some time to grow on you. I didn’t like it that much during my first playthrough either, even though I’d now proudly declare it was one of my favourite experiences from the past 12 months.

Though, that’s just my story. I’m curious about your own. Has there ever been a game where you had a similar experience to my own? What game did you fall in love with after giving it a second chance? I’d enjoy hearing from you in the comments if you’re willing to share.

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