Spoilers ahead; contains violent and disturbing imagery.

I got to the second boss in Nine Sols yesterday—Goumang, a Solar like the protagonist. At first, she reads like a standard antagonist. Even the way she eats those eye-like grapes feels controlled and a bit unsettling. The setup points to ambition and control: she’s turned two ape-people into zombies and uses them as tools. The fight backs that up—she shakes a bell to bring them back, and if I focus only on the zombies, she just keeps ringing it, reviving them over and over.

After the fight, the context shifts. Goumang joined the Council during a famine and ended up in charge of food production. She runs a tightly controlled soilless cultivation system. The two “zombies” weren’t random—they were ape-children she had taken in and put to work farming. When they died, she brought them back, kept fragments of their awareness, and put them under control so they could keep producing food.

That changes how everything reads. What she does is still disturbing, but there’s a strange sense of care in it. And she comes off as unexpectedly endearing. Players already know she isn’t killed in the end—she’s fitted with her own control device, and the fight just stops there. It’s an open ending. Some people want her to come back as an NPC, others are already making fan art.

From what I’ve seen in spoilers, the player character, Yi, starts to look more questionable as the story goes on. It’s implied he may have been involved in the sacrificial system, or at least knew about the villagers’ ritual early on. Compared to that, Goumang doesn’t directly harm people. If that’s true, then she isn’t an exception—she’s a mirror.

This kind of writing feels very typical of Red Candle Games. I had the same reaction years ago playing Detention and Devotion—that sudden shift in how you read a character. It shows up here again. The visual style mixes Taoist imagery with sci-fi, and the environments and music build that same tight, controlled pressure. What stands out more is the contrast: the player moves smoothly, confidently, but that doesn’t mean you’re on the “right” side.

I’m getting ready to take on the next boss, Yanlao. The maze leading up to it took me a while, but I finally made it through. The boss itself is basically a claw-machine mechanic—simple in theory, but I’m just a bit off with my timing, so I haven’t beaten it yet. In most games, that kind of repetition would get frustrating. Here, it doesn’t. The music carries it.

I’ll include the tracks for Goumang and Yanlao here. They change how the fights feel—less like obstacles, more like controlled sequences you stay inside of. It reinforces the overall tone rather than breaking it.

I strongly recommend this game.