NINE SOLS

“A journey of Asian fantasy inspired by Sekiro, Hollow Knight and Katana Zero.”

Nine Sols is a lore-rich, hand-drawn 2D action platformer featuring intense deflection-focused combat, immersive storytelling, and a unique Taopunk setting.

Explore the land once home to an ancient alien race, and follow a vengeful hero’s quest to slay the 9 Sols, formidable rulers of this forsaken realm.

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• Build a stylish Taopunk world that blends cyberpunk/sci-fi elements with Taoism and Far Eastern mythology.

• Recreate the deflection focused Sekiro combat experience in 2D and meld it with classic side-scrolling exploration.

• Incorporate anime/manga-influenced, hand-crafted art and dark electronic sound mixed with Eastern instruments.

  　　　　　

Nine Sols’s gameplay comprises fast-paced 2D action and exploration that draws on classic platforming techniques. Given our background in producing narrative-driven games, the studio also focused on crafting an immersive hand-drawn world with a fresh Asian fantasy setting, vivid characters, and a solid storyline.

“Become one with the Tao…”

New Kunlun, the Solarian’s last sanctuary, has remained quiet for centuries. Inside this vast realm, the ancient gods bequeathed mortals with a promised land that is forever protected by a set of sacred rituals. Yet the truth of this world remains unknown to most. Everything changes when Yi, a long forgotten hero from the past, is awoken by a human child.

During the course of the game, you will follow Yi on his vengeful quest against the 9 Sols, formidable rulers of this forsaken realm, and obliterate any obstacles in your way using Sekiro-lite style combat. Explore a dark fantasy world where every path is fraught with danger, and unravel the mysteries of an ancient alien race as you learn about the fate of mankind.

Shan-Hai Archive -restored file no.0425

For the past two years, we’ve spent considerable time and effort testing and modifying our core combat mechanics. Not only should the controls feel smooth and responsive, but countless other elements must be considered when coming up with a fun, innovative, and user-friendly combat system.

As such, we have designed our fights with an emphasis on close-range encounters and the use of deflection and charging attacks. However, the traditional side-scrolling action controls remain unchanged, so you are free to use moves like dash, double jump, and wall jump/climb in the same ways you’re familiar with.

• Deflection - Yi’s most powerful skill. Deflecting an opponent’s attack not only allows you to avoid damage, but also to absorb and accumulate energy (Chi) with which to launch a stylish charging attack. Using quick reflexes and precise timing, you can escape numerous life-threatening situations with the simple press of a button.

• Charging Attack and Chi Explosion - Having succeeded in deflecting an enemy's attack, you can reverse or “deflect” the damage onto enemy targets by sticking a Chi-filled talisman known as a “Foo charm” onto an enemy body during a charging attack and blowing them up with a spell.

• Slash Attack, Dash and Double Jump - The classic action platformer controls are included in the game, so feel free to mix them up in combat situations.

• Bow - To enable more variations in the main combat loop, we will add a long-range weapon to the available arsenal. Yi’s Godly Bow offers a powerful solution to any combat situation.

Monsters are designed to test a player's skill to execute the correct move in the right moment. While it might be difficult at times, when players are used to the above tools and grasp the game’s core rhythm, the experience can be both satisfying and rewarding.

Ready yourself to fight an assortment of callous ancient guardians and gruesome creatures. Be patient, utilize every tool in your arsenal, and mix it up with Yi’s Godly Bow to defeat these larger-than-life figures.

The 9 Sols of New Kunlun is your ultimate challenge. Each boss has a different personality and unique fighting style, and it’s up to you to figure out the best way to defeat them.

Almost all facets of the game have undergone countless iterations, from the hand-drawn environments and sprite animations, to the world setting elements and narrative arcs. We had a clear goal of combining Taoism with cyberpunk, melding sci-fi elements with Eastern mythology, yet the actual process of doing so has been challenging. The product of this challenge is the New Kunlun, our depiction of a Taopunk world.

Different areas in the New Kunlun are mostly interconnected, while each region has its own architectural style and environment. Explore and discover hidden secrets/treasures and put your platforming skills to the test.

Meet and interact with NPCs to trade, receive upgrades, and gain new abilities. In this deserted world, it’s important to grab hold of all the help you can get. Through conversations with these vivid characters, more background stories and lores are revealed.

Nine Sols features meticulous hand-crafted, anime-style landscapes and sprite-based animations, and blends these with manga-inspired cutscenes. Every frame is carefully drawn in a traditional style and we have taken great pains to create the most eye-catching fluid animations.

Meridian Skills and Abilities

By defeating enemies you will gain experience, and once leveled up, Yi can receive permanent upgrades and gain new skills. These improvements can be game changers, so choose wisely.

Jade and Passive Abilities

When equipped with jade, Yi is further empowered with different passive abilities. These passive skills could come in handy in various situations. Leveraging the power of the jade in your fights may bring you strategic advantages as well as other benefits.

Purchase and Modification

Items in the game can be purchased with Jin, a rare metal that’s essential to Solarian technology. Jin is also used in order to gain equipment modifications; for example, to apply enhancement to Yi’s bow and ammunition.

The sound in Nine Sols will be unique and distinctive while not breaking immersion. With a setting that features both sci-fi and Asian mythology, we aim to blend various traditional Eastern instruments and vocal sounds with modern electronic synthesizers.

Fusing Asian cultural sounds with the game's narrative, we hope to deliver a pleasant albeit experimental auditory experience to visitors of our Taopunk world.

Our aim is to release the game on Steam for PC/Mac, as well as both the Nintendo and Sony consoles. But since the porting process won't start until the game is near completion, and due to the fact that Nine Sols's development is in between console generations, it is difficult to provide a definitive list of supported platforms at the moment.

That being said, we do have most things in place to support consoles, having already acquired the Switch and PS devkits, therefore backers should rest assured that we will give our best efforts to support more platforms as the project progresses.

The game is currently available in English, Japanese, Korean, as well as Traditional and Simplified Chinese. We may offer more languages in the future, depending on the amount of resources we are able to pool together.

Localization is never easy, and perhaps it is especially difficult with Nine Sols, considering its manifold Asian cultural references and the Taoist philosophy at its core. Regardless, showcasing our culture is a crucial part of our mission, so we assure you that maximum effort will be put into localization.

*Above images of physical products are for reference only, we will give our best efforts to deliver the highest quality products possible, but actual product may vary due to product enhancement.

Red Candle Games was founded in Taipei in 2015. We are the creators behind the psychological horror games Detention (2017) and Devotion (2019). As of today, the company consists of 12 full-time members. It is a small team of self-driven, dedicated problem solvers who are experienced in all aspects of the game making business.

We genuinely try to empower and encourage each individual employee to express themselves and make direct contributions to our titles. Making games is a group effort, but at the same time we trust each individual artist to help make our games shine!

With Nine Sols, our studio aims to deliver a stylized action platformer that coheres with and complements the lore-rich narrative. It is without doubt our most ambitious project to date in terms of project size, estimated development time, and overall cost.

Nine Sols has been an ongoing project of Red Candle for more than two years. We actually began looking at prototypes for this game a couple months after the launch of Devotion, so we are thoroughly committed to this project. We want to state clearly that the crowdfunding campaign will not alter the fate of Nine Sols, meaning that we will do our absolute best to complete the game regardless of the result.

The truth is, the main goal of this campaign is to receive feedback from you. As always, our main concern is about what you, the player, think of our game.

With its emphasis on action gameplay and telling a "Taopunk" story, Nine Sols is far larger in scale than anything Red Candle Games has produced in the past. It is therefore crucial that we find out what the market thinks of it during the development phase. After all, we've already taken a risk and poured all our resources into it. If the public reaction is overwhelmingly negative, it is better for us to prepare for the worst.

That being said, the more money we raise, the more resources our team will have to enhance the game's overall experience. We'd be able to polish it even further before the launch, and have far more leeway in which to expand and improve it.

If you like what we're doing with this new game, we would truly appreciate it if you could support us to make it even better. You can do this by sharing this campaign with others, providing constructive criticism, or backing our project directly.

We recognize that crowdfunding projects often come with a certain level of risk for the backer, so we want to assure you that Red Candle Games is here to complete the final product and deliver it to our players.

For the past six years, our studio has successfully released multiple titles including Detention (2017) and Devotion (2019). We know what it takes to develop and publish a game, and have done so at least twice before. We have a solid and comprehensive pipeline, which includes marketing, finance and business management. It's a Red Candle tradition to do most of our work in-house so that we maintain total control over our content.

Additionally, after more than two years of development, most of Nine Sols's core mechanics have been completed, and about one-third of overall content, including environments, character/enemy animations and cutscenes, are ready for demo.

The next phase of development is to mass produce the drafted content and, based on our established processes, we expect to complete the game by Q2 2023 at the latest.

Again, we plan to continue until we achieve our ultimate goal, which is to see the game launched successfully and on time. There will certainly be challenges, but we assure you that every single member of our team will give everything we've got to overcome them and provide you with an excellent product.