Look, I know we're all playing Silksong, but if I could direct your attention to a slightly different Metroidvania for a moment—Nine Sols, Red Candle's first and only action foray, was one of my favourite videogames from 2024, period. Contributor Abbie Stone waxed lyrical about it back in June of that year, but for some baffling reason I didn't get Yi-pilled until May. We all make mistakes.
Something weird is happening with it, though: At the time of writing, if you have Nine Sols installed and enter "shanhaiarchive" into its beta tab (found in Steam's properties) you can download and play an entirely separate game. Unfortunately, I have a frail constitution that makes me deathly allergic to jumpscares (or 'a coward', if you're boring) so I'll be showing you a playthrough shared to YouTube courtesy of Shadowking.
What I can provide is context. This entire ARG started back in September 10, with a video dubbed "Dark Legacy of the Sun Tribe" posted to the game's YouTube channel. This official creepypasta is reminiscent of SCP informational videos, and asks viewers to inspect their hands to see if they might be descended from "the four-fingered ones."
That's a direct reference to Nine Sols' characters. All of which, including the human-like "apemen", have four fingers. The rest of the video follows an archaeologist following the traces of Xu Fu (a real-world alchemist and explorer) who lived in 255 BC, and didn't return from his second jaunt to seek the Elixir of Life—which the video references.
I'm about to get into spoiler territory for Nine Sols, by the way: Choosing Xu Fu is super interesting, as most of the events of Nine Sols center around the Solarians attempting to find a cure for the Tianhuo virus. Including—and this relates to the ARG stuff shown above—an alternate reality called the Soulscape, where Solarians could rest as they tried to reverse their grim fate.
In Red Candle's video, the archaeologist vanishes under mysterious circumstances, obsessed with an ancient city called Penglai—the name of the Solariian's home planet from the game.
As for that hidden horror game, which tasks you with attempting to "save Yuuki Wu", the architectural style is really familiar. It sees you waking up in what looks like a Solarian ruin. Notably, you're a human with the right amount of fingers with modern clothes—however, completing it sees a screen that states "simulation complete, thank you for your computing power."
Again, this is all Soulscape-adjacent. However, completing the game with your Steam name set to "Yuuki Wu" reveals, as spotted by the very same Shadowking on the game's Reddit, an alternate ending.
In this one, you put on a Soulscape headset and are transported into a village as a four-fingered apeman in front of a similar temple—where Shadowking finds gravestones with the names "Kuafu" and "Shennong" written on them, two NPCs from Nine Sols. Eventually, you're digitally shunted into another room, reaching out to a Mystic Nymph trapped in some kind of engine.
In the original game, the Mystic Nymph was a little scouting drone made by protagonist Yi, and given to Shuanshuan just before the game's true ending, wherein the surviving apemen and Kuafu make it to a "Pale Blue Planet"—likely, as this ARG confirms, what would become our present-day Earth.
Oh and, lastly, there was a stream tallying up players' scores to fill a progress bar, depicting someone (presumably Yuuki) lying on a hospital bed as the number went up. The stream was live for about 11 hours.
If I had to take a guess at what this all means, I'd wager that Yuuki is someone trapped in a Soulscape somehow—in the base Nine Sols games, being in a Soulscape for too long could drive you mad, or make you dependent on it—and they're harvesting "computational power" from the brains of explorers in a bid to escape. In Nine Sols, this is why the Solarians had Apemen captive in a fake village, to harvest their brains for similar computational power.
As for why? Haven't the foggiest, but if Red Candle Games is hinting at its next title, it may well be set in the Nine Sols universe. Whether the studio will make another banger sekiro-like or go back to its usual horror stylings, though? It's hard to say. I'm personally hoping for the latter, because Nine Sols has some of my favourite brawls in the genre.
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