I played a big video game

I don’t often play video games, and when I do they’re small games, the kind that can be finished in two or three hours of play. I had not attempted a big video game since teenage.
It took me over four months to finish Nine Sols¹. All in all, about 140 hours of play. My nerves were pushed harder than they had been in a long time, and my obsessive streak was fully triggered. As I started to get sucked in, it became clear that I needed to set boundaries for my well-being; I forced myself not to play after 7pm, and no more than two hours of play in a day.

For years I had been thinking of playing a big video game. In January, after having bought the well regarded Hollow Knight as a Christmas gift for my nephews, I decided to get a different big game for myself.

I bought Nine Sols, and in many ways it has been an ideal choice². This is a game that forces you to get skilled. There are no magic weapons that make you invincible, no random deus ex machina moments that level you up.
As you gather better weapons and become more skilled, so do the section bosses you fight. The final boss must have killed me a hundred times. It left precious little room for error. By the time I got to it, I was used to the unforgiving combat that punished you for any fleeting loss of concentration. The demand for focus with the final boss was so intense that I found I could play no more than 20 consecutive minutes without becoming a pile of nerves.

It’s been a very different experience, playing a big game in 2026 instead of in the late 1980s. If I came to a standstill, I could reach for information available on the internet about playing Nine Sols. I perused Frostilyte’s boss guides³ periodically. There were many videos on Youtube of people fighting the various bosses⁴, or just doing “walkthroughs.”

It came as a surprise to me, the extent to which I developed a sense of style for the game. A certain way I liked to play it and fight enemies. I’d watch a video of someone else’s walkthrough and I’d take tips, or I’d scoff because their play was all reflexes and no skill.
Skill, in this game, meant reading attacks, and defending with precisely timed parries followed by a swift counterstrike. When well played, your character, Yi, an enigmatic cat dressed in a yellow robe, would stay still a lot, and strike surgically. It brought to mind Bruce Lee’s quote “Be water, my friend.”

The game develops several characters and tells a story of hubris and civilizational collapse. It has grace notes too, like a cyborg you come across at various stages, Chiyou, who has developed sentient behavior. At one point, talking of his own awakening, he says:

[…] the world is much too colorful to not listen to one’s heart and waste time on tasks assigned by others.

The day I defeated the final boss, Eigong, on my first try for the day, was one of those rare moments of clarity where time seems to run slower, and your reflexes and your reasoning are in tune.

For future reference, some pointers on playing the game in the footnotes⁵. Who knows, I might re-play one day.