So, a game I’ve been playing recently is Nine Sols, a 2D platforming action game by Red Candle Studios released around this time last year. I’ve played it to completion last week to the utter exclusion of basically everything else, and at the end of it, I find myself wanting to talk about it. Not about the gameplay, because that’s not what this blog is about, but the story and the writing. This’ll be a new occasional mini-series on this blog, where I do a deep(ish) dive into the writing and storytelling structure of whatever interested me that week. Hope you’ll enjoy!

Spoilers for Nine Sols follows. If you want to experience the game for yourself, I suggest you go and do so before you read this.

Genre-wise, Nine Sols is basically a cyberpunk story pushed through the filter of Asian mythology and Taoist philosophy, where humanity has been kidnapped to act as both a food and power source for the ultra-advanced aliens called as the Solarians, who are – and let’s be generous about this – a race of sexy cat people. You play as Yi, a Solarian who was betrayed by his mentor and left for dead, only to be found by a human boy when he landed in their holding pen. The human, Shuanshaun, nurses Yi back to health, and he goes on an epic quest for revenge against his former mentor and her council of cronies, known as the Ten Sols.

On the surface, the story is a fairly standard anime revenge plot, but it gets deeper the more you get into it. As the game progresses, you learn that the reason the Solarians kidnapped humans was part of a grand scheme to cure themselves of a virus that’s been wiping out their entire species, one by one. You learn that the scientists who basically ran this society created this virus by accident, a byproduct of their experiments trying to achieve immortality. You see more and more depraved experiments committed by the scientists become more and more desperate to find a cure, only to find out in the end that there is no cure, and they’ve doomed their race to extinction.

Now, at this point, you may be tempted to decry this as “anti-science propaganda”, and yeah, the story is very heavily weighted against science from a spiritual standpoint, but I don’t really think that’s what the game is about. What the game seems to be about is accepting death, coming to terms with the end. Several of the game’s villains are villainous specifically because they won’t accept that their time is up. The warlord dude refuses to accept that his kingdom is gone, and becomes obsessed with reclaiming its former glory. The artist girl refuses to accept that her brother is dead, and parades his corpse around in makeup. The main villain, who was responsible for creating the virus, refuses to accept that there is no fixing her mistake, and goes completely insane as a result.

The main character, Yi, exemplifies this theme perfectly. Over the course of the game, you learn that the plan to kidnap and use humans was his idea. Not only that, but he came up with it in an effort to save his sister from the encroaching virus, and his refusal to accept that the virus can’t be stopped. His sister, meanwhile, accepts this, and refuses to help him. The end result of this is that Yi has to watch his plan fall apart horribly and see his people turn into mutants, while his sister, as far as we can tell, succumbs to the disease peacefully and without regrets. Consistently, the people in this game who accept the oncoming apocalypse are the ones who get the happiest endings. This all culminates in what I believe to be the good ending of the game, where Yi decides to essentially forsake his revenge and help the humans escape the Solarians, accepting that the death of his race in inevitable, but that of the humans isn’t, and so it’s his responsibility to save them. It’s a beautifully realised story, and it’s all viewed through the lens of Taoist philosophy that makes it all that more intriguing. I greatly enjoyed Nine Sols and the world it built, and I’d highly recommend checking it out for yourself.

Anyway, Spiritbinders releases next week.