Nine Sols

Nine Sols is a 2024 action-platform game developed and published by Red Candle Games. The game is set in an Asian fantasy-inspired futuristic world which Red Candle Games describes as "taopunk", a combination of Taoism and cyberpunk, stating that “[they] had a clear goal of combining Taoism with cyberpunk, melding sci-fi elements with Eastern mythology." In gameplay, combat emphasizes the player deflecting attacks from enemies to build up energy to perform special attacks. It features a hand-drawn animation style. The game was released on Microsoft Windows and macOS on May 29, 2024, which was followed by home console ports on November 26. On the same day, a major patch was released, introducing a boss rush style gamemode called "battle memories".

Five hundred years before the events of the game, the Tianhuo virus infected the Solarians, a race of cat-like aliens. With no cure in sight, their leaders, the Ten Sols, developed the Eternal Cauldron Project, in which Solarians could rest in a virtual reality system known as the Soulscape to delay the virus while they searched for a cure. However, the processing power to create the Soulscape required the brains of intelligent lifeforms, so the Solarians left their home planet of Penglai and embarked on a 500-year-long journey aboard the island-ship New Kunlun to the Solar System and its "pale-blue planet" , to kidnap and harvest the native "apemen".