Nine Sols is an action-platform game developed and published by Taiwanese indie studio Red Candle Games, best known for creating Detention (2017) and Devotion. The game draws heavily from games like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Hollow Knight, but features a unique "taopunk" setting, beautifully hand-drawn characters and backgrounds, and many incredible bosses to defeat.

Our story begins long ago in the land of New Kunlun, when a forgotten hero named Yi has an attempt made on his life by the Tiandao Council. Several centuries later, he has reawakened with one simple goal in mind - to kill each and every one of the Sols for this grave betrayal. This quest for vengeance eventually leads Yi to further unravel the complexities of the world he exists in and the true costs of chasing eternal life.

The game was released on PC via Steam on May 29, 2024 and was released for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch on November 26 the same year.

Nine Sols contains examples of:

• 1-Up: The Revival Jade operates as an extra life when equipped, reviving Yi at 25% of his maximum health and granting him a small period of invulnerability when he would die.
• Ability Required to Proceed: All of the abilities unlocked with the progress into the game allow Yi to get into previously unavailable places, starting with the recharged Mystic Nymph needed to even enter the first proper zone, through the Tai-Chi Kick letting him bounce off special pads and the Charged Strike to break through tougher barriers, and finishing with Super Mutant Breaker to put down growths of mutated solarians that are fused with structures, preventing access to certain areas.
• Aborted Arc: Early in the game, Yi is seen to stagger and cough, implying that he is succumbing to Tianhuo, in one case passing out and having to be recovered to the Pavilion. This happens once or twice and then never happens and is never discussed again, despite the obvious story implications of a constantly-resurrecting being catching a plague that grants immortality... of sorts.
• Absurdly Low Level Cap: With either careful play or a spot of grinding, it's possible to hit the maximum level hours before finishing the game. This won't net you enough points to buy every skill, as the rest are given by Tao fruits found across New Kunlun.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Chiyou will sell you a variety of different food items, with more becoming available later in the game, but despite having the same gameplay benefit, each tends to cost more than the last. Potentially justified as some of the later items are described as being very rare.
  • Played straighter with the Computing Upgrades and Medicinal Vials. Somehow 3D printing the exact same item requires escalating amounts of Jin.
• Air-Dashing: Your basic dash will eventually be upgraded to allow it to work in the air, letting you dodge past lasers and get through mazes of spikes and electrified floors. The Swift Descent jade grants the ability to dash straight downwards.
• Alien Abduction: The apemen - or rather, humans - were taken from the Pale Blue Planet (read: Earth) to be used as resources for the solarians.
• Alien Sky: One flashback shows that the solarians' homeworld has multiple moons of various colors orbiting the planet, one of which is artificial.
• All for Nothing:
  • The hidden terminal at the end of the game confirms that the Eternal Cauldron project was doomed from the start, as the Tianhuo virus is incurable in a traditional sense. It isn't even a "virus" so much as a vital, naturally occurring gene in Solarians - the very gene that gives them sapience - that reacted to Eigong's meddling with immortality and became a sort of killswitch — or, as Heng put it, the Tianhuo was simply a sign that it was time for their people to return to the earth. By struggling against it, Yi lost what little time he had left to cherish with his sister, condemned thousands of his people to a Fate Worse than Death and put a whole other sapient species at risk of extinction, though the true ending suggests that the tutelage he gave to Shuanshuan will later become the foundation of Chinese culture.
  • Played for Laughs with the fortune telling machine, which is made out of parts of all the Shanhai 9000 (and one Shanhai 1000) bots Yi has spared by coughing up 400 Jin per copy of a chip with their map data. Yi is rather unhappy with this development and the machine only prognosticates bad things happening to him.
  • The "Home Sweet Home" ending has shades of this. Yi is back on Penglai, but appears to be the only Solarian either alive or not sleeping (Kuafu is notably absent). Even though he's "home", there's still no guarantee Tianhuo can be cured (because it can't be just removed, and it's not clear if modifying it it to "turn off the killswitch" is within Yi's capabilities) and so it's likely all the surviving Solarians will need to remain in hibernation indefinitely^note given the vastly reduced number of surviving Solarians, further brain harvesting likely won't be necessary, as they were only chosen as opposed to normal computers due to sheer number of Soulscapes simulated. All he's done is kept the Eternal Cauldron going just in a different physical location, made it so that humanity may be torn away from their homeworld permanently, and killed a bunch of people and solved nothing in the process, including failing to atone for his own sins. However, an above-zero chance for the cure still exists, and the humans at least were not left in that pitiful state, as they seem to have assimilated into their new home.
  • Shanhai 9000 is finally able to locate Chien, only she's long since mutated and immediately destroys Shanhai once she's released.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Goumang's fate has Yi turn the brainwashing collar she used on the Jiangshi soldiers on her, reducing her to a motionless vegetable.
  • Lady Ethereal was reduced to a Brain in a Jar, trapping her with her guilt within a lucid nightmare.
• Anti-Frustration Features: At release, the map for each region was completely blank, and you would only begin filling it in once you found the Shanhai 9000 unit for the region and brought its map data back to the Four Seasons. An early update changed this so the map would always be available, although you still need to fill it in yourself and you still need the map data in order to get the readout of how many items are in each room.
• Apocalypse How: Species Extinction, via the Tianhuo virus outbreak. While it wasn't immediately fatal, it left no chances for solarians and led the Tiandao council of Sols to power (so that they could try to develop the cure). This apocalypse is the result of Eigong's experiments in trying to achieve biological immortality randomly reacting with an important gene that Solarians cannot survive without and spreading like wildfire across Penglai in the process.
  • Also nearly inflicted on the apemen, as New Kunlun essentially functions like a Dyson sphere by partially covering the surface of the sun to accumulate energy for the eventual return trip to the Solarian home planet of Penglai and to ensure that onboard facilities have constant power, thereby inducing an artificial ice age on Earth, to say nothing of the systematic brain harvesting.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Lear, the sage responsible for the postwar Taoist era in Penglai, eventually shed his mortal body and joined the flow of Tao.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Played with in the true ending. Shennong and Shuanshuan, a.k.a. Shuanyuan the Yellow Emperor, two of the mythical founders of China, had both been tutored by an advanced alien race.
  • Those alien cats have the same names as various deities from Chinese mythology, which could imply that was the true story behind those deities' myths (in which case the historic record clearly got incredibly warped over time).
  • More mundanely, by strong implication, cats, more generally, are aliens. Solarians are just standard domestic cats whose sapience is granted by a couple of extra genes; specifically the ones Eigong messed up by trying to make them immortal that converted into Tianhuo.
• Bittersweet Ending: Both endings count as this:
  • Home Sweet Home: After defeating Eigong, Yi chooses to return to Penglai along with Kuafu and the apemen. However, it is clear that Tianhuo and its mutated variant remain with no cure in sight, and as a result he's forced to leave all the solarians in a massive Lotus-Eater Machine. On the other hand, the remaining survivors are alive and well, so there's hope for them to rebuild.
  • Shooting Star: Yi chooses to return all the humans on New Kunlun back to Earth so they can have a chance to rebuild their civilization. However, in order to stop Eigong after she transforms into a terrible beast by merging with the Fusang Reactor, he destroys New Kunlun using an immensely powerful explosive and dies in the process, leaving Shuanshuan bereaved and Kuafu as the sole survivor of their race. Nevertheless, the humans arrive safely on Earth and Yi's beliefs and teachings live on in Shuanshuan.
• Blind Weaponmaster: Elite Empyrean Swordsmen keep watch over the Empyrean District, where they stand silently and motionlessly on roofs in the background, with their hands always ready on the handle of their blade. They seem to be unable to spot Yi if he keeps off the grass, but a single blade of grass being trampled will alert a nearby swordsman and, after being announced with a particular oriental soundbite, strike with a deadly three-hit combo.
• Body Horror: Solarians who are affected by the mutated variant of Tianhuo are covered in pink growths and their face transforms into a giant pink slitted eye.
• Body of Bodies: Some of the mutants in the Research Institute are scythe-armed spider-like amalgamates, with multiple heads of victims making up their biomass sticking out of the sides.
• Bombardier Mook: One type of flying insect in Goumang's farm will shoot a spreadshot of three arcing projectiles at you.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • There are many jades you can use for your builds. However, having jades that improve your survival in one way or another will never be a wrong choice. To list a few examples: "Quick Dose" simply speeds up the time Yi uses his healing pipe, allowing to recover health more safely^note Although more skilled players can find time to heal easy without spending two slots on this jade; "Breather" will ensure your internal damage from imprecise parries quickly gets turned back into health, keeping your health high; "Revival" immediately restores a little bit of health whenever your health is depleted, essentially giving Yi a heroic second wind^note Just be sure to not die from some weak attack or burn before health drops generated by this jade are collected....
  • When it comes to arrows, "Cloud Piercer" is the first one you get and it does not do anything flashy. It shoots in a straight line, and that's about it. However, it also staggers enemies (including bosses), canceling out certain attacks that you might find particularly dangerous and letting you fight longer. When fully upgraded, it can melt through any normal enemies you hit and do good chunk of damage to bosses.
• Boss-Altering Consequence: Jiequan begins his fight inside his transmutation chamber, trying to alter his body to make himself even stronger. If you have found the Gene Eradicator, you can add it to the chamber while he's in it, poisoning him and causing him to stagger repeatedly during the fight. Of course, given who Jiequan is, he actually congratulates you for doing so, calling you just like him for fighting dirty if that's what it takes to win.
• Brick Joke: The Shanhai 9000 units aside from the New Seasons Pavillion one have holographic sea creatures for heads in their displays. The Shanhai 1000 (the earliest incarnation of the robots) from Ji's logs on its creation reveals this design is partly because Ji actually wanted to put a real fish with water for the head as a form of symbolism of Penglai's mountains and seas, but it was shot down for being too costly.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Several concepts and objects in this name have a mystical, almost religious name to them, when they're really just referring to something with a more mundane real-life counterpart. For example, Transmutation is confirmed to simply be genetic engineering, while Azure Sand is a type of complex nanoparticle. The most prominent is "rhizomatic energy" as a term for qi — as qi is literally life energy, this has ominous implications for rhizomatic energy's widespread use.
  • More mundanely, the humans living on New Kunlun are called "apemen" by the solarians, and Earth is solely referred to as "the Pale Blue Planet".
• Cast from Hit Points: Several Jades will give you a sizable power boost, such as Swift Blade dramatically increasing your attack speed or Qi Swipe giving you double Qi gain on a precise parry, at the cost of making those actions inflict internal damage onto yourself.
• Cat Folk: The Solarians are aliens resembling bipedal, humanoid cats. As in, they are very literally cats. As Eigong discovers, if you remove the Tianhuo gene from a Solarian's embryo, the result is a domestic cat.
• Cats Are Mean: The Solarians have prominent feline traits and treat humanity like cattle.
• Celibate Hero: Yi shows no romantic interest in anyone either before or after his resurrection.
• Charged Attack: The Charged Blade technique demands a couple seconds of holding down the attack button without being hit, letting Yi make a strong sword thrust with extended range. The Unbounded Counter is a charged block that protects against nearly everything, but requires standing still and leaves Yi open to attack when mistimed by failing to accumulate the charge before the attack hits, waiting too long and failing to unleash Counter or having the charge dissipate.
• Collision Damage: Usually averted with few exceptions: small floorbound drones and the blobby things from the Transmutation Zone deal damage on contact. Larger variants of mutants don't inherently have contact damage, but they're covered in regrowing spikes.
• Common Tongue: The Solarians and the apemen are both able to talk, read and write in the same language^note A mixture of various dialects of Chinese, with a writing system designed to resemble Chinese characters while - for the most part - not matching any real characters. This is despite the two being a completely separate species with no common ancestry or culture let alone the fact that the Solarians expressly view and treat the apemen as livestock.
• Company Cross-References: When Yi hands Shuanshuan a VR headset, Shuanshuan navigates through its menus and, under "Top Horror Games", finds a game he calls "De-tension", referencing Red Candle Games's first game Detention (2017). He also says it doesn't sound very interesting.
• Counter-Attack: One of core mechanics is that by parrying, Yi accumulates "Qi energy". He then can apply explosive talismans using that energy, thus returning any harm that would be done to him towards enemies. However, talisman detonation can be interrupted, so care should be taken.
  • Unbound Counter does that more directly, dealing some internal damage to the attacker when executed, and with the Reciprocation Jade even transferring a significant portion of Yi's accumulated internal damage to enemy.
• Credits Gag: The credits at one point has "male butler" translated as "YAREYARE", referencing a Korean song that is popular back when the game released.
• Cyberspace: Yi can give Shuanshuan a Virtual Reality Device. Included within said device is an Easter Egg as a namedrop of Red Candle Games' first game, Detention.
  • Kanghui also wears a quite large one over his face as part of the machine.
• Cypher Language: The written Solarian language is made up of modified Chinese character radicals, that each represent a letter on a QWERTY keyboard as used to write Chinese. The various Sol seals are similarly modified Chinese characters, although the original characters don’t have any relation to the seals’ stated meanings.
• Dead Man Writing: All the radio "conversations" with Heng are audio messages that traveled 500 light years. Heng sent her calls knowing she won't live to hear a response from her brother and Yi knows that she has died long ago, though the game keeps it as a secret and presents the messages as mere flashbacks, with Yi daydreaming about their common past on Penglai.
• Deadpan Snarker: Yi is quite snarky, especially when he is dealing with other Sols.
• Death of Personality: The mutated strain of Tianhuo ultimately causes the afflicted Solarians to transform into grotesque monsters, and none of their original selves or personalities remain in later stages. They become incredibly hostile and seem to display a collective consciousness.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • The path to reach the Central Power Reservoir forks into two. To ensure the player experiences the first flashback with Heng, the scene accomodates both paths, with both horizontal directions that the floating elevator moves in during the seamlessly changing cutscene..
  • It's impossible to kill Jiequan when you first encounter him, even in Story Mode - he has infinite health and his attacks ignore any damage reductions, so you will always go down in one or two hits. This is because him abducting you and taking you to prison is a plot-critical event, and naturally you killing him would completely ruin the game's pacing.
• Distant Sequel: The Discord ARG is set after the "Shooting Star" ending in the modern era, focusing on the one Shanhai 9000 in Four Seasons Pavilion as it stations itself on the moon and contacts users to give it computing power by doing tasks, from recovering its' memories and playing games, with a recreation of a long-dead friend Old Chang, and assist Yuuki Wu in attempting to decipher ancient texts, eventually discovering a conspiracy that strives to conceal all info about the Solarians and those related to them. The finale ends with it sacrificing the last of its' power to reincarnate its master Chien as a normal cat on Earth.
• Double Jump: Unlocked surprisingly late into the game.
• Easier Than Easy: Story Mode offers customisable multipliers for damage dealt and taken. At the maximum settings of 1000% damage dealt and 1% damage taken, you can one-shot most bosses with a single arrow (while they at best do chip damage) and most other things will die in one or two hits without you even making any effort to parry them.
• Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: While the game isn't easy by any means, regular exploration of New Kunlun is far less taxing than taking on the numerous bosses on show. Every area has a checkpoint, and you can unlock shortcuts back to these checkpoints as your progress. Meanwhile nearly every boss can kill you in the space of a combo, and you must beat all their multiple phases in the one attempt.
• Evolving Title Screen: Defeating the True Final Boss changes the title screen to the humans' new colony on Earth.
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father: Yi's parents were devout Taoists, forcing Yi to study science in secret. Although, it's implied his mother was more strict than his father, as a flashback showed his mother angrily rebuking Yi for offering them spots on New Kunlun whereas his father just wanted to keep the peace.
• Fantastic Nuke: The rhizomatic bomb, which was used by the Fangshi clan in the war against the Jie kingdom, a technology so feared that Lear himself entombed it with the fallen sojourners Luyan, Yinjifu, and Guiguzi to ensure that it was not used again. Yi can find this bomb in the Grotto of Scriptures if he completes the three parry challenge rooms in the zone and subsequently defeats Spirit Keeper Cixing guarding the entrance. Kuafu marvels at its power when you bring it to him. If Yi chooses to save the apemen, Kuafu uses it to forge the rhizomatic arrow, and Yi has to use it to blow up the Primordial Roots Fusang after Eigong infects it with mutated Tianhuo, blowing up New Kunlun while he is still on it.
• Fantastic Racism: The Sols are shown, in one of the council meeting recordings at the end of the game, to view mankind to be beneath them and speak of them with contempt (despite never actually having seen, let alone spoken to a real human before), treating them as a resource to be killed, exploited and harvested, in much the same way as 19th century colonialists talked about the inhabitants of their colonies. The sense of inherent superiority seems to be strongly ingrained, since even the relatively-nice Kuafu initially reacts extremely poorly to being expected to share space with Shuanshuan, and retains a bit of lingering wariness of him and the other apemen right up until the end of the game.
• Fate Worse than Death:
  • Kanghui has been mutated so much that he's constantly coughing up fleshy chunks that mutate into animal-like creatures that prowl the prison underneath the transmutation factory. The machine that holds him keeps him immobile, blindfolded, in a constant feral state, and even repairs his wounds in case his Healing Factor isn't enough, ensuring that he'll be in there as long as it's operational. When Yi breaks down this machine enough for some lucidity to slip through, all Kanghui does is beg Yi to kill him.
  • Ji sees his agelessness as this. He outright states that he attempted to take his own life in the past (or at least seriously considered it) but didn't have the courage.
  • While it's left ambiguous as to whether Fuxi is aware of what he's become by the events of the game, he's still reduced to a bloated, incoherent abomination by the time you get to him.
• Fling a Light into the Future: As solarians were dying from the Tianhuo virus, leaving their homeworld in peril, they launched New Kunlun into deep space, where the finest of their scientists are trying to find the cure while many other solarians are waiting in hibernation pods.
• Floating Continent: New Kunlun is an entire island that has been converted into a gigantic spaceship.
• Foreshadowing: In a flashback to when Yi and Heng were children from Heng's second message, Heng recalls something she learned in school about how the light from the stars are from hundreds of years ago and the light seen by the naked eye are potentially from stars that have long burnt out, describing them as "echoes of the past". Heng's messages, as revealed in the true ending, are in fact from centuries ago as the distance from Penglai from New Kunlun was so great that it would take centuries from them to reach Yi and Heng herself is long dead.
• Four-Fingered Hands: All the characters in the game are depicted with four fingers, including the human characters.
• The Four Gods: Most of the enemies encountered in the game belong to four Legions named after the Four Auspicious Beasts: the infantry-based red-gold Tiger Legion, turqouise-green Dragon Legion is specialist/ninja focused, yellow-grey Phoenix Legion is responsible for flying mooks and turquoise-red Turtle Legion provides mechanical mighty glaciers.
• God Guise: The Sols seem to have introduced themselves long ago as gods to ancient humans, which wasn't hard for interstellar travelers appearing before Bronze Age societies. The Apemen center their worship around them, speaking about the Sols in pure reverence and praying to them. Automatic systems keeping after the livestock pens might listen, but Sols don't because they're busy either hibernating to slow the progress of Tianhuo or working on the cure (and in any event, the Sols see the apemen the same way humans tend to see sheep, so they have no interest in anything they might have to say either way). Yi attempts to stop the Shaman from prostrating before him non-stop as he has no taste for worship, finding it headache-inducing, and tries to convince her and the rest of the tribe to start caring for themselves instead.
• Gone Horribly Right: The Tianhuo virus was created accidentally by Eigong in an attempt to make Solarians immortal. It does do that… but only after the infected turn into hideous, Nigh-Invulnerable monsters. She later concludes, after years of failing to cure the virus, that this actually is the next stage in Solarians’ evolution, and plans to infect the whole species with it.
• Goomba Springboard: Landing hits in mid-air allows Yi to extend his airtime a little bit and attaching the talisman refreshes the Double Jump and the air attack count. There are two special instances of floating bots in Research Institute that can respawn without having to go to rest at the Root Node, as they're to be exploited to get somewhere.
• Gorn: This game warns players that some scenes may seem violent or cruel. They are not kidding.
  • There are not one, but TWO cinematics where Yi is wounded enough to have several vital organs on display.
  • The opening sequence uses this to properly establish the tone of the game (aside from the previously-mentioned cinematic cutscenes, of course). Those from Peach Blossom Village who are chosen to "live with the Gods" are sent into a device that has a pod clamp onto their head, and twist it off.
    • The processing of the rest of the body isn't that much prettier, either. The headless bodies have their limbs cut off, and they're preserved in some pink gelatin-like substance, the color implying that the bodies don't even have their blood drained.
  • Most enemies in the game explode into Ludicrous Gibs when defeated, including the more mechanical-looking ones.
  • When Goumang is defeated, her legs are messily torn from her body. Adding to that, her backstory implies that she had her original limbs cut off and had bird-like prosthetics grafted in their place.
  • Several characters (including Goumang, Yi, Ji, Shennong, the Shaman, Chiyou and Eigong) have detailed talksprites where they're severely wounded, often including some blood in the eyes, to boot.
  • It might be hard to spot when one is focused on the foreground fight, but the background to Lady Ethereal's boss fight appears to be a close-up on the back of her head with a large incision in it. In phase two, the incision parts, revealing her colorless brain pulsing under there.
  • At the end of the Kanghui fight, he asks Yi to end his misery by activating a guillotine that slices his head off.
  • Should you purchase all of Chiyou's wares, he tries to Mercy Kill his brother and fails miserably. While escaping from the mutant-infested research center after Eigong takes your Sol seals, you can find him, or rather, his top half a short ways away from the door to the room where Xingtian is kept, leaving a trail of organs from the door to himself. His face isn't that much prettier either with how his blood runs through his large teeth.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Invoked in-universe. During the Peach Blossom Festival, a helmet is clamped down over the chosen's head, they're seen to ascend, then a pillar of light obscures everything in the device as there is a cutting sound and most of the body falls back down to be taken away to be turned into meat, with it looking, to an observer, like they ascended.
• Hacking Minigame: Hacking entails inputting a randomly generated sequence directional inputs four — sometimes five — elements long shown on the screen, which itself can repeat up to three times. Getting hit breaks Yi's focus and requires starting over, so they're often used to force the player to fight off enemies in order to progress, without completely locking them in an area.
• Hard Light: Yellowish light is occassionally seen making up bridges allowing access to the Radiant Pagoda in the Power Reservoir and leading to the Root Pinnacle where the Tiandao Council used to gather.
• Hazard Attack: Most Crimson Attacks from the mid-game onwards leave red flames on the ground which either occupy an area for a few seconds or spread across the arena; while they do not interrupt Yi's attacks, they drain his health for a while even after he escapes the burning area. The only way to prevent these flames from forming is to prevent the attacks that generate them from completing, using either the Tai-Chi Kick or (more often) the Unbounded Counter.
• Healing Boss:
  • Celestial Sentinel Wuqiang, from the Transmutation Factory, is fought on an arena that doesn't lock down, so to avoid having him cheesed by chipping away at him from the entrances, he regains health when Yi is not on the same floor as he is.
  • See examples for Jiequan and Xingtian in the [[Characters/Nine Sols Characters]] tab.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: The first spar with Jiequan, inside the lower floor of the Transmutation Factory, is impossible to win. The boss bar doesn't even appear.
• Hope Sprouts Eternal: In a post-credits scene after the true ending, the Mystic Nymph, now controlled by Shuanshuan, locates some growing vegetation upon arriving on Earth, indicating that the humans' new colony can survive despite its 500 year long New Kunlun-inflicted ice age.
• Human Resources: A key component of the Eternal Cauldron Project is farming harvesting the apemen for their brains and bodies. The "livestock" are lured into performing an elaborate ritual, during which they are beheaded, the head kept separate and brain extracted, and the remaining body dropped into the "apeman facility" to have clothing and limbs removed, after which they are packaged up as meat and shipped to the station's residential area. Notably, this was all Yi's idea, that he had no ethical qualms about, and that he only regretted after bonding with some apemen himself.
• Iaijutsu Practitioner: Eigong's Laser Blade doesn't even have an actual sheath, yet she goes on as if she had one at her waist anyway when preparing some of her attacks, in particular the screen-wide slashes that start with a crimson attack.
• Injured Player Character Stage: Yi suffers horribly at the hands of Jiequan when he's caught. After his Mystic Nymph spontaneously activates and gets him released from the torture device, Yi can't move as fast as usual, his attack combo has considerable lag after ending, and is missing most of his core moves, chiefly the parry and the Immortal Dash. Not only, but until he finds a Root Node to rest, his health is capped at 2.5 segments, so about 75HP, low enough that a single hit from most of the enemies will kill him.
• Insignificant Little Blue Planet: Solarians always call Earth the "Pale Blue Planet". Yi also points out that moving New Kunlun to the sun also caused Earth to enter an ice age due to the astronomically significant growth of the Primordial Roots, which ends once Yi fires the Rhizomatic Arrow.
• In Working Order: In every sector, Yi can find a Solarian artifact to give to Shuanshuan, which even includes high-end gadgets. Despite his young age and the differing technological development of his own species and Yi's, he eventually takes to these seemingly unfamiliar relics like a fish to water.
• It's All My Fault: Lady Ethereal blames herself for what happened with her Soulscape project, as it was too perfect, so perfect that her volunteers didn’t want to wake up, which lead themselves to suicide.
• "Just Frame" Bonus: Parrying is Yi's basic defensive option. Precise parrying is performed by inputting the parry right as the incoming attack hits, which leaves Yi unscathed, otherwise he takes Internal Damage.
• Karmic Death: This is what happens to many of the Sols after Yi defeats them:
  • In Yanlao's paranoia to avoid death at Yi's hands, he spends most of your time in the warehouse running from you instead of remaining in his safe room where he can subdue the effects of his natural diseases. Because of this, he keels over before you can even lay a finger on him.
  • Jiequan tries to transmutate one final time, but the mutation is extreme enough to break his body apart.
  • After showing no concern for anybody but her own brother, Nuwa dies while embracing Fuxi as spikes sprouting out of him impale her.
• Laser Blade: Eigong's hairpiece is in actuality a handle for a crimson energy blade, which she uses to great effect in her bossfight at the very end of the game. A detail worth noting is that the blade doesn't cast a shadow, as light doesn't obstruct light.
• Last Chance Hitpoint: The internal damage coming from improperly timed parries can accumulate, but it can't kill. It's still nerve-wracking being one missed parry away from death.
• Last-Second Ending Choice: After Ruyi's death, Yi must decide whether to focus on saving the apemen, or trying to preserve the few remaining Solarians. Choosing to save the Solarians unlocks the "Home Sweet Home" ending, while choosing to save the apemen leads to the "Shooting Star" ending.
• Leitmotif:
  • A specific set of four notes appears over and over across the entire game, in the past and in the present. This melody was what Heng, Yi's sister, was playing 500 years ago, it is what wakes up Yi at the beginning of the game when Shuanshuan plays it, it composes the Ancient Penglai Ballad, and its notes even play when switching between positions in menus. It can be called the game's Main Theme and symbolizes the omnipresence of the Tao.
  • Take a Tour in New Kunlun is the theme of the Shanhai line of robotic tour guides.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: All the solarians on New Kunlun spend the vast majority of their time sleeping in stasis chambers that allow them to simulate any kind of world they desire. As we learn from Lady Ethereal, they were TOO effective.
  • Later on, several solarians clearly high on drugs can be seen in the Fengs' hall; this implies the issue was still not fully fixed and Nuwa resolved to keep her "guests" drugged to stop them from killing themselves.
• Meaningful Echo: If Yi chooses to save the apemen, when he listens to Heng's final message, she says, "I'm not going anywhere. I'll just be stepping ahead of you to return to heaven and earth". When he subsequently speaks to Shuanshuan when Eigong infects the Fusang roots with Tianhuo and he has to use the Rhizomatic bomb, he says, "When the end comes, we'll just return to heaven and earth."
• Meat Moss: Pink growths draping over the floor and walls are the signature mark of the mutated Tianhuo, present in the Empyrean District and Eigong's Research Center. It often grows spikes and intertwines with rubble and metal, blocking passage. Many Vital Sanctums, life support systems supposed to preserve solarians, have been destroyed by the creeping mass, with blobs growing in the pods.
• Metal Slime: White-gold Chicken Walkers that carry chests on their backs are found in out-of-the-way places. If alerted and not defeated swiftly, they'll teleport out with their precious cargo and one will need to rest at the Root Node to get them to reappear. When destroyed, they do not respawn.
• Monumental Damage: Each area of New Kunlun features an elaborate statue of one of the nine Sols, marking whose domain it is. Naturally, the only one in a state of disrepair is Yi's, having been cast out of the Tiandao council 500 years prior.
• Money for Nothing: Jin is spent solely on upgrades, with no consumables on offer to pay for. After exhausting Kuafu's, Chiyou's, and the 3D printer's stock, there will be nothing else to buy.
• No Hugging, No Kissing: The closest Yi gets is Lady Ethereal's mild flirting when he first enters her Soulscape.
• Non-Lethal Bottomless Pits: Falling into water, spiky pits or off high places simply deals a portion of damage and respawns Yi back where he last properly stood, unless the health bar is completely drained.
• Only the Leads Get a Downer Ending: The true ending has the Apemen back on Earth and forming a new colony, after years of brutal treatment, however all Solarians bar one (Kuafu) are dead due to either Tianhuo, being killed by Yi or being blown up, so the race is effectively extinct, and the only remnants or knowledge of Solarian society will live on solely through what has been passed to Shuanshuan.
• Organic Technology: Many enemies you face throughout the game look robotic, but are revealed to be more like biotech organisms upon death, enhanced with cybernetics.
• Parrying Bullets: Fairly easy with arrows/bolts, but hitscan Crimson projectiles require the Unbound Counter.
• Permanently Missable Content: There are a handful of achievements that can either be missed or are mutually exclusive.
  • Fight Through Hardship: Finish the game on standard difficulty without ever dropping down to story mode.
  • Fight Dirty: You must sabotage Jiequan's transmutation chamber with the Gene Eradicator, before attempting to fight him for the first time.
  • Robo Fight!: You must defeat the miniboss Tianshou by hacking and piloting a nearby robot. This is more lenient than the above achievement, since it doesn't matter if you run into Tianshou too early.
  • What Have You Done?: You must break the pot made by Shuanshuan before he hands it to Kuafu.
  • Repurposed & You Bastard: In one playthrough you must peacefully acquire all the map data chips from the Shanhai 9000's. This leads to Shuanshuan making a Shanhai fortune-telling unit by himself. In another playthrough you must take out a Shanhai's chip by force.
• People Farms: To the Apemen, it's Peach Blossom Village. To the Sols, it's just livestock pen number 95.
• Planet Spaceship: The Haotian Sphere measured 9000 li (or 4,500 kilometers, making it slightly larger than Earth's Moon), visible in certain cutscenes on Penglai where it covers much of the sky. It was constructed under the guise of being just a deep-space telescope (actually functional in this aspect), with its real purpose being a way to estabilish supremacy for the Jie kingdom. Before its rhizomatic cannons were finished, the Jie clan was defeated by Lear and his Fangshi Guild.
• Platonic Cave: The Peach Blossom Village exemplifies this. The villagers inhabit a seemingly idyllic world, mirroring Earth, and are indoctrinated to believe the Sols are benevolent deities demanding ritual worship. This entire existence is a fabricated utopia masking the villagers' true fate as livestock for the Sols to harvest their brains and flesh. Until it was attacked twice, all but Shennong and Shuanshuan wanted to return to how it was before Yi destroyed the harvester.
• Point of No Return: Meeting Eigong for the first time prompts her to unleash the mutants across the station, sealing off all the routes beyond one specific path to the now-wrecked Four Seasons Pavilion. The Fusang Horn is broken completely so teleporting outside is not an option. The only things left to do are telling goodbyes to remaining characters and, if available, choosing whether to save Apemen or the Solarians and finishing two particular character sidequests, then it's time for the final showdown. The game is rather gentle with the player, as Ruyi calls before the last stretch to warn the player to finish any other business before proceeding and the game backs up the last save made before crossing this Rubicon, which can be reloaded later... after defeating Eigong.
• Practical Currency: Jin looks much like gold, but it's actually a superconductive material used in every sort of electronic device, which gives explanation for why sellers require it (including Yi's good friend Kuafu, who helps him free of charge, but needs raw materials) and justifies cyborg guards and machines dropping it as loot.
• Prison Level: Appropriately, Prison that Jiequan throws Yi into. It's simultaneously a Stealth-Based Mission, Injured Player Character Stage, Blackout Basement and No-Gear Level as Yi must get out of prison while severely weakened from endured torture. Most of his mobility skills are absent (including Immortal Dash), he walks slower, and his health bar is almost non-existent, there are invincible security drones around that can sound the alarm if they spot him, summoning the dangerous and grotesque warden, pots to hide in and several notes from already-dead prisoners. It's not until Yi finds the local Root Node and rests that he returns to his combat-capable condition.
• Pyramid Power: In the deepest part of the Power Reservoir district is located a massive four-sided pyramid known as the Radiant Pagoda, which serves as the nexus and control center for all power produced and distributed on New Kunlun.
• The Purge: Near the resting place of Lear, Yi discovers the bodies of the three sojourners of the Fangshi Guild and the recording of the Inaction Declaration itself which signaled the end of the Fangshi Guild and the start of the Origin Era, where Taoism dominated. Lear confirms that he killed the three, with the game implying it was either shortly after this moment or shortly before.
• Red Herring: When first walking through the Cortex chamber, you're greeted to the game playing tricks on you by making the room loop back into itself as it starts raining blood and a demonic visage that wouldn't be out of place in the developer's previous games flashes on screen, suggesting that whatever's waiting for you there is particularly heinous and malicious. When you actually return there to face Lady Ethereal, she's by far the kindest one of the lot, and Yi not only ends up offering her to settle the matter of the Sol Seal nonlethally, he wants to actively help her.
• Reviving Enemy:
  • Blobby monsters found on the upper floors of the transmutation factory will reform over and over if beaten into a pulp with the regular blade and talisman attacks. They can be disposed of with incinerators and spiked pits.
  • Later on, the mutant strain of Tianhuo subverts the regular disease and makes solarians infected by it unable to die while degrading their sanity, turning them into cancerous growths, walking or static. Trying to kill a mutant only causes it to faint for a short while and return with full health. Thankfully, Kuafu can figure out a way to destroy them after analyzing the serum that first created them and the genetic code of the Kunlun Immortal Ji, whose unique DNA was transplanted to others when researching immortality. The "Super Mutant Breaker" device allows the talisman detonation to put mutants down for good.
• Risqué Animal Business: Most of the primary characters are anthropomorphic cat-like beings called solarians; along with the game's animated aesthetic, this allows the game to delve into some very mature and horrific territory (with the game's first scene being Yi being killed and him subsequently lying on the ground with his organs exposed), including the solarians' domestication of the "ape-men", Lady Ethereal's Lotus-Eater Machine, the Tianhuo outbreak, and Fuxi and Nuwa's incestuous relationship.
• Rule of Symbolism: The entire plot is effectively symbolic of Daoism and the folly of seeking to become immortal rather than seeking enlightenment, which ties into a larger theme of accepting impermanence as a natural part of life. Only two beings are actually immortal in the setting, one of which is Lear who achieved it effectively on accident by achieving enlightenment, and Ji, who doesn't know how he became immortal. Neither one sought it, and while the former attained it through enlightenment, it was never his goal but an accidental byproduct of his enlightenment, and the latter is genuinely happy to finally stop being immortal due to how lonely and painful it is. However, Lear's immortality is a spiritual immortality, and Ji's is a physical one. Eigong seeks physical immortality for the sake of making all Sols immortal, and her attempts end up dooming her and all of her race for her transgressions, demonstrating that the pursuit of immortality for its own sake is not only meaningless, but actively harmful to oneself and those around them. Daoism is meant to be a spiritual path to enlightenment, and becoming an "immortal" is meant to be a byproduct of becoming enlightened. Those that pursue Daoism solely for the sake of immortality will never reach it, since they cannot attain the enlightenment needed to attain immortality because part of reaching that spiritual enlightenment requires letting go of the focus on the physical and instead focusing on the spiritual.
• Scale of Scientific Sins: Eigong sparks the whole plot of the game by committing the fourth transgression in the scale: attempting to attain immortality. It promptly comes to bite, not just her, but the entire solarian race in the ass, by triggering a plague, Tianhuo, that dooms them all to extinction.
• Sea Monster: The massive windows inside the underground Tiandao Research Center give view into the depths of Lake Yaochi, where some sort of giant being can be seen swimming occasionally.
• Shaping Your Attacks: Yi always forms a glowing green sword when hitting the Triple Strike combo and the Charged Strike.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Haotian Sphere is a spherical space station orbiting Penglai that's equipped with devastating laser weaponry.
  • Lady Ethereal's boss fight heavily evokes the Mantis Lords/Sisters of Battle fight from Hollow Knight, with the first phase being a fight against her by herself and the second phase adding two clones of her into the mix.
  • In the Fengs' hall, two Solarians can be seen in the background doing the high-elbow dance done by the MEME clones from ME!ME!ME!.
  • The entire premise, of Yi waking up and exploring New Kunlun, effectively a gigantic space station and a research facility, well after disaster has struck, evolving mutants that are assimilating more and more of the station over time, and in the good ending, needing the station to be blown up to prevent any of the contaminants spreading beyond the station itself bears a lot of similarity to the plot and setting of Metroid Fusion.
• Sickening Slaughterhouse: The euphemistically-named Apeman facility is essentially one big meat-packing plant for human bodies.
• The Sleepless: A group of individuals known as the Dusk Guardians are raised from their stasis prematurely to ensure New Kunlun is running smoothly. To this end, they've been genetically modified to never sleep. They also serve as Eigong's batch of test subjects after "retirement" in the "Ascension Palace".
• Son of an Ape: Humans are termed "apemen" by the Solarians.
• Speaking Simlish: All the characters in the game speak a Conlang which, while translated into English for the player's convenience, is a vaguely Hokkein/Mandarin-sounding gibberish.
• Spiteful Suicide: In the Shooting Star ending, Eigong, mortality wounded in her clash with Yi, decides to slit her own throat... Right on top of New Kunlun's power core, infecting the Primordial Roots with her modified Tianhuo virus, as she had planned to do anyways, forcing Yi to destroy the station with himself on it to stop the resulting Eldritch Abomination.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: Things begin to get really serious when the additional occupants of the Pavilion are gone - Shennong leaves to become the new leader of the apemen, Shanhai 9000 finally finds Chien and is destroyed by her, and Chiyou goes to put down Xingtian, only to be mortally injured by him.
• Stealth-Based Mission: After he is rescued by the Mystic Nymph after being captured and tortured by Jiequan, Yi has to sneak out of the prison area. Due to his injuries, his health is reduced to minimum and he loses access to several abilities, such as healing, his bow, and even the Immortal Dash (trying to dodge or sprint causes him to fall over). Apart from that, the area is fairly dark and is patrolled by several enemies, including robots who will bind Yi if they detect him, as well as the Jailer, a powerful creature which can teleport instantly to where Yi has been detected and kill him in one hit. Yi must therefore stay out of enemy line of sight, as well as hide in pots while they are moving past. Thankfully, Yi regains all his abilities when he finds and rests at a root node, allowing him to fight against Kanghui and escape.
• The Stinger: The Apemen arriving back on Earth and finding growing vegetation as the planet thaws from its ice age, watching the sun rise over the mountains. The final shot is of their new colony, apparently thriving.
• Sucking-In Lines:
  • Yi attracts green Qi energy when preparing the Charged Blade and the Unbounded Counter.
  • For his phase switch, General Yingzhao jumps back near the main power core to skim some energy off of it to charge his spear up, unlocking more powerful moves.
• Sufficiently Advanced Bamboo Technology: The Grotto of Scriptures looks on the surface as a complex of caves, even if elaborately decorated and carved, yet underneath it's packed to the brim with extremely advanced technology that keeps it safe from intruders.
• Super Drowning Skills: Yi hates water it seems. Falling into it deals a portion of damage and respawns him on the last visited stable ground. While most of the water hazards are Grimy Water thick with toxic fertilizer or mutated Tianhuo, even clear water of Lake Yaochi or in the caves near the Peach Blossom Village is just as dangerous.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: As Jiequan points out, Yi struggled to defeat a geriatric, terminal man, and a farmer. When facing a Sol who's actually a trained warrior, their first match is a one sided Curb-Stomp Battle Hopeless Bossfight.
  • During the Final Boss fight with Eigong, opon entering her Golden Ending exclusive third phase, she will suddenly start to be overcome with her modified Tianhuo virus, before seemingly suppressing the mutation with sheer will (save for some of the cancerous growths remaining in the back of her head) and continue the fight. However, while her attacks are far more ferocious, she is notably much more squishy than she was before. She is fighting off a terminal disease and just got done getting the life beat out of her by Yi after all. Just because she's resisting the disease and fighting with all she has doesn't mean she's not still at deaths door.
• Sword Beam:
  • With the Qi Blade Jade, the final hit of Yi's combo fires a far-reaching wave of damaging energy by automatically spending 2 charges of Qi if they're available.
  • Eigong herself has an attack string of screen-wide slashes that hit like four trucks.
• To Serve Man: Not only are the Apemen brains harvested for processing power, a cutscene where Shuanshuan makes Yi and Kuafu dinner makes it clear that the Solarians also ate human meat. One of the recipes found in a solarian cookbook that is gifted to him is "Peachy Primate Paradise", which demands a human "sated heart" as an ingredient. A trip through the apeman processing facility shows the carcasses are prepared before being wrapped with a clear packaging and stamped with some sort of mark - they're also shown being shipped up towards the Empyrean District.
• Token Romance: Word of God revealed that Lady Ethereal was in a relationship with one of her fellow scientists. This really doesn't affect her or her backstory.
• Tsundere: The personality of Shanhai 9000 stationed near Goumang's farm is programmed like this.
• Unblockable Attack: Subverted. Early on, you're introduced to Crimson Attacks, which can't be parried and must be dodged instead. However, later on in your journey, you will acquire the Unbound Counter technique which can block normal and Crimson Attacks but requires a time investment to charge up and release with precise timing into an incoming attack.
  • Played straight with fires, which cannot be blocked, only avoided (or prevented by blocking the attack that would spread fires in a first place). Luckily Damage Over Time from fires doesn't interrupt Yi's actions.
  • Eigong can conjure a Talisman much like Yi's, which sticks to the player character if she catches him. Even Unbounded Counter will not help.
• Uplifted Animal: A secret terminal reveals that solarians were a result of the Tianhuo virus infecting cats. Removing the virus from them through genetic manipulation reverts them back into feral animals.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Tiandao Research Center, which leads into the Tianhuo Research Institute. It's the island's primary research facility overseen by Eigong, as well as the place where she performed her tests and searched for the cure to the Tianhuo virus. Unusually, reaching the end of the area isn't all that challenging. Getting out though...
• Video Game Caring Potential: Instead of simply taking Shanhai 9000 map data chips by force, you can pay them money so they replicate it. There's achievement for doing that with every Shanhai bot met which ends up with them all destroyed anyway.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Another achievement has you tear out a Shanhai 9000's map data by force, breaking it.
  • Yi may also break a clay pot that Shuanshuan made which causes different dialogue once he gives it to Kuafu, alongside a more scuffed clay pot.
• Video Game Dashing: Appropriately named Immortal Dash, which also provides brief invincibility when used. Upgradable to Air-Dashing later on.
• Viral Transformation: Upon death, beautiful flowers with ten petals sprout from the corpses of victims of the Tianhuo virus.
  • Those affected by Eigong's serum can instead mutate into hideous, virtually indestructible monsters that appear to have a collective consciousness.
  • A secret terminal reveals that the virus initially evolved solarians into intelligent beings. Trying to remove it through genetic manipulation reverts them to feral cats.
• Warp Whistle: Or rather, horn. Lear gifts Yi with the Fusang Horn at the first visit in the Four Seasons Pavilion's Root Node, enabling him to transport between the Pavilion and the last used node. At the last third of the game, the Horn is upgraded with a proper teleportation function that works on any discovered Root Node. It breaks at the two most inopportune moments: Yi cannot use it to escape the prison when he's horribly wounded by the tortures at the hands of Jiequan, and he's unable to quickly return to protect the Four Seasons Pavilion when it's attacked by Eigong.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The Sky Rending Claw is equipped with a powerful red beam, used if it successfully lands its grab attack. Yi uses it for himself when he hacks the Claw at the end of the fight to blast through a solid wall to get to Yanlao.
• Weaponized Headgear: The Jailer keeps a conical hat that he can throw like a boomerang and functions as a teleporter letting him catch Yi no matter where he's spotted.
• Wetware CPU: Apeman brains are harvested to provide processing power to a massive virtual reality project known as the Soulscape, designed to pass the time for the population of hundred thousand Solarians aboard the New Kunlun, letting them wait for a cure for the Tianhuo. Don't worry, the rest doesn't go to waste.
• Wham Line: In the true ending, "You have no more unread messages from Penglai," confirming that Heng died long ago.
• You Are Too Late: Eigong to Yi during the Shooting Star ending by infecting the roots.