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Developer/publisher Red Candle Games Format PC Release Out now

It’s on top form when Red Candle runs with its bizarre ideas, but not so much when it slavishly follows Soulslike rules

GREAT APE Humanity features in a minor but valuable side role in Nine Sols. After his resurrection, Yi lies low in a tiny human village, whose inhabitants are unaware of what lies beyond. That ignorance is manufactured by the Sols, for whom these ‘apemen’, gathered from Earth, are mere livestock to be harvested for parts. Not the most auspicious portrayal of our species, then, but of course it’s a role reversal of our own exploitative colonising activity. Yi is then in for a shock when a village boy named Shuanshuan takes up residence in his hideout. To keep the kid occupied you can bring back gifts from your adventures (instruments, board games, cook books) and watch Yi’s surprise as Shuanshuan reveals levels of aptitude his captors would never have thought possible.

When you’ve made your reputation with powerful ghost stories, it’s some departure to build a knotty action platformer citing Sekiro, of all things, as an influence. Nine Sols shows, though, that Red Candle has several more strings to its bow – if we didn’t know better, we wouldn’t have guessed the Taiwanese studio was new to the genre. Still, when the intro sees cat-like protagonist Yi fall to his death, skull smashed, then resurrected by creeping black tentacles, it’s also a relief to see the maker of Detention and Devotion hasn’t lost its knack for the grim and sinister.