In 2002, researchers in China’s Hunan province made a staggering discovery. At the bottom of a long abandoned well, they found over 36,000 bamboo slips dating back to the Qin dynasty—Imperial China’s very first. Upon each slip read a record. Most of these communicated, ironically, that they had nothing to report. Others made mention of local herbs or remedies, serving as a sort of anthropological goldmine of life in ancient China. Due to the incredible volume of records recovered and their wide range of content, one would be forgiven for thinking that researchers had stumbled upon nothing important, perhaps nothing more than the personal records of a typical village. But with each slip transcribed, a larger picture started to form. These weren’t just records—they were responses. Tens of thousands of bamboo slips, each their own answer to a single unifying question, asked by none less than China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. He wasn’t interested in cures for various maladies or in fauna, his concern was much more seraphic. He sought a means to extend his life and reign sovereign over China for eternity. He sought the elixir of life.
Qin Shi Huang tasked alchemist and explorer Xu Fu with finding this legendary panacea. Traveling eastward, Xu Fu thought, would land him at the foot of Mount Penglai: a mythical island where winters never spoil crops, palaces are built of gold and silver, and trees bear fruit with the power to deter death. It was, by all accounts, utopia, and the exact place Qin Shi Huang could realize immortality. Xu Fu arrived at what is now Japan, or died at sea during the journey; history isn’t clear one way or the other. The only absolute fact is that Xu Fu never returned to China. The least likely outcome is that he found Mount Penglai—a shining paradise where one would want nevermore, an Eden bestowing unparalleled opulence to all who arrived.
Still, what if he did?
Nine Sols, developed by Red Candle Games, doesn’t task players with finding Mount Penglai; in fact, it’s already been found. It’s where protagonist Yi grew up, though the game takes some liberties here: Penglai is the given name of Yi’s home planet, freeing this utopia from the geographical confines of a single mountain. It’s here where Yi developed a passion for science, owing to the rich technological advancements of the historic Fangshi Guild, and it’s where a similar quest for immortality begins. Eigong, a researcher at the Tiandao Research Center, became obsessed with preserving the lifespan of Solarians, Nine Sols’ predominant race. Her pursuits led her to genetic modification, and inadvertently, the creation of an unstoppable virus. Dubbed Tianhuo, this disease has the potential to eradicate all life on Penglai—first by weakening the victim’s immune systems, proceeding to destroy every cell in their body. All that remains of the infected is the visage of a corpse, obscured by a growth of pale fungal flowers. It’s a grisly fate.
The most scientifically minded Solarians, a council dubbed the Ten Sols, concoct a plan to save their species. They would construct a massive orbital city, New Kunlun, where all citizens were placed into a cryosleep until a cure was found. The spacecraft would, in the meantime, navigate the cosmos in search of intelligent life—not to aid the Solarians in finding a cure, but to harvest their brains for the processing power needed to maintain suspended hibernation. Yi, the newest member of the Sols, is the one who initially proposed this plan. In a real “the ends justify the means” move, he claims that survival of the Solarian people is tantamount to the suffering of an undesignated species, and the measure is entitled the Eternal Cauldron Project.
We see Penglai only in flashbacks, long after New Kunlun’s departure from the planet. Yi reminisces about conversations he had there with his sister Heng. While Yi followed the pursuit of knowledge and science, Heng was more attuned to the spiritual energy of the planet. Tianhuo, to her, was not a sickness to be overcome through scientific advancement, but the natural conclusion of life. She believed that Solarians should accept the natural cycle of life and death, rather than fight to prolong what should be inevitable. Yi’s overwhelming love for his sister led him down the opposite path. Each believes in their own Penglai; their own utopia. Yi’s heaven is an engineered one, a forward thinking civilization where Penglai is free of all that would cause it harm, while Heng’s utopia is a natural one, where introspection is instead spent on the present moment.
The idea of utopia comes to us by way of Sir Thomas More, Lord High Chancellor under Henry VIII. In his 1516 satire Utopia, More details the intricate failings of a so-called-perfect society under the pretense that the microscopic management of all variables needed to achieve perfection is incompatible with the free will humans would desire in said utopia. The word “utopia” itself comes from the Greek words for “not” (οὐ) and “place” (τόπος). It’s an impossible dream, but Nine Sols dispels this notion. Penglai is indeed real. Instead of asking us to ponder whether something impossible can exist, Nine Sols asks us how we intend to achieve that.
Yi’s engineered utopia is a two-fold idea. The ultimate goal is to eradicate Tianhuo and return to Penglai with no risk of succumbence. To achieve utopia, one must build for that utopia. Penglai remains the desired end, but the means, New Kunlun, must be accordingly nirvanic. The city’s Empyrean District, where the slumbering Solarians are kept, echoes the description of Mount Penglai: pristine and ornate dwellings; Elysium realized. Beyond the decor of New Kunlun, scientific measure and mathematical prowess require full-cylindrical sublimity to ensure the city-craft’s endurance. Both the operation of and appearance of this spacecraft scream harmonic aspiration.
It needs to be stated again—the operation of New Kunlun relies on the unwilling abduction of sentient life for the sake of harvesting their brains. The Solarians found an apt supply of fodder for their machine: a luminous body they dubbed the “Pale Blue Planet.” It’s Earth. They’re harvesting humans. Their brains power the Solarian’s cryosleep, and the remainder is genetically transmuted into a subservient ooze thereby made responsible for the melodic performance of the city. New Kunlun operates on blood. Can this horrific machine ever truly claim to be in the service of utopia? Nine Sols tells us that the engineered utopia is the one most in line with Sir Thomas More’s reasoning. In the pursuit of operational perfection, humanity must be sacrificed. It isn’t personal freedom being quashed, it’s personhood. The engineered utopia, by sheer definition, creates obstacles that must be overcome in satiation of utopia.
Yi is betrayed by the Ten Sols council prior to the events of the game. Despite all moral reckoning, it isn’t the discovery that humankind is being schlopped to the slaughterhouse that sets him off—this is entirely what the Eternal Cauldron Project was meant to be—it’s the revelation that Eigong was responsible for the Tianhou virus which claimed Penglai. Yi’s parents perished at the hands of the illness, and Heng’s transcendent disposition ensured she would follow soon thereafter. Enraged at his mentor’s hubris and transgressions, he vowed his revenge, only to fall at Eigong’s blade.
Miraculously, Yi survives. The ethereal properties heralded by Heng grant him rejuvenation—it’s here where the core gameplay loop of Nine Sols comes into focus. Its DNA is equal parts Metroid and Sekiro. While the hallmarks of an action-adventure platformer are all present, Nine Sols employs a particular breed of combat where a heavy focus on parrying attacks with immaculate precision is the key to survival. The i-frames granted with a dodge are nothing compared to the devastating follow-ups possible when perfectly countering an enemy’s advance. It should come to no surprise that the plot’s transgressor, Eigong, is the final boss of the game, and she demands absolute mastery of parry patience. Anything less ends in failure.
As such, the game is a rush of adrenaline to play. Beyond that enticing action, I firmly believe a game is the best medium with which to tell this story. An engineered utopia creates obstacles; prior hubris necessitates adversity. To achieve true harmony, those obstacles you’ve created must be dealt with, and that process in turn creates even more obstacles. The Sekiro-style gameplay exists because Yi’s quest is one of punishment: if creating a perfect world was easy, we would have already done it a hundred times over. The player must suffer through Nine Sols in order to truly understand what it means to engineer utopia.
In Yi’s rejuvenation, he enters a state of deep healing that results in a centuries-long slumber. He’s found by one of the Solarian’s captive humans: Shuanshuan, a child whose parents were recently selected to be harvested. With nothing else remaining in this world, Shuanshuan quickly attaches to Yi, and over the course of Nine Sols, we see the continual deepening of their bond.
Remarkably, we have a physical way to mark this: the Four Seasons Pavilion. This is the base of operations for Yi’s revenge quest. At the beginning of Nine Sols, it’s empty and somewhat dilapidated. There are a handful of key items that the player can give to Shuanshuan—sculpting clay, a chess board, a calligraphy set, etc—that will allow the two to interact and learn more about each other. Shuanshuan quickly fills the halls with handmade decor, wall art, and other general signs of life. The Four Seasons Pavilion transforms into something serene and homely. The more it grows, the more it resembles Heng’s natural utopia: one where the future isn’t the primary concern. Outside the Pavilion, the player will be fighting for their life, exploring every nook and cranny of New Kunlun, running towards the next boss fight. The Pavilion carries none of that. It’s peaceful. Here, Yi can talk to Shuanshuan. Enjoy a game of chess. Lounge on a custom-built chair. The time spent here is only ever spent in the moment.
Yi’s revenge quest begins purely out of selfish reasons. He seeks retribution against the Sols for the emotional harm they inflicted on him—they created Tianhuo and killed his family. They intruded on his plan to create a perfect world. He’s cruel and overly vicious to the first Sols he encounters: he entraps one in a mind-frying apparatus, and to another, he performs actions that irrefutably violate the Geneva Conventions. As Yi’s bond with Shuanshaun expands, his motivations and actions change. Whereas he once sought to regain control of the Eternal Cauldron Project in order to course correct the efforts to revive Penglai, he now wishes to free Solarians from the violent cycle they currently exist within. He no longer seeks vengeance against the Sols. He offers the last few of them mercy. If they meet a gruesome end, it’s often through their own machinations, not Yi’s.
The Sekiro-style action of Nine Sols takes a new meaning through the lens of this natural utopia: new obstacles are not created—they are of a finite amount, and can be overcome to achieve harmony. Combat becomes less about perfection, and more about consonance. As previously mentioned, the final boss fight against Eigong requires complete mastery of the game’s systems. Near flawless execution is a must. However, I didn’t win the fight and feel a sense of pride in my performance. The rhythm of parries and counters had formed a sort of symphony that, over time, felt like muscle memory. It felt more like a cleansing than a victory.
Nine Sols isn’t subtle about its Taoist influence. The religious belief system held by Solarians is literally Taoism. The tradition’s iconography adorn the numerous districts of New Kunlun. It’s a practice that I think has always lent itself well to the way people talk about Dark Souls and other FromSoftware games. It’s the search for longevity and the overcoming, through ritual and mystical practices, of the physical limitations of the body. That’s Dark Souls to a tee. There is no shortage of personal, powerful anecdotes about the perseverance it takes to complete a FromSoftware game, let alone the real-world allegories that players derive from this experience of persistence. Nine Sols wears this Taoist approach on its kimono furnished sleeve.
The Fangshi Guild, led by the Taoist master Lear, serves as the greatest Tao influence in the game. When obtaining new abilities and techniques, Yi is sent into the spirit realm where he communes with Lear directly. As the interiors of New Kunlun are explored in totality, the player comes to understand that the Fangshi Guild recognized the horrors that their power could bestow upon the world. Their advanced scientific prowess would all too easily give way to destruction in the sake of betterance. They successfully pinpointed the dangers of an engineered utopia and chose to lock it away, ceasing any further development of experimental technologies.
In the pursuit of nirvana, Eigong chases the silhouette left behind by the Fangshi Guild. She rejects their warnings and looks towards the future of Solarians. Her engineered utopia runs into the same celestial bureaucracy that all utopias eventually do: perfection cannot exist while free will does. There are too many variables to be accounted for when ascribing humanity. Her solution to this problem lies within the same genetic modification that bore the creation of Tianhou—certain altered genomes within test subjects induced horrific mutations that bore creation to a race united under a collective consciousness; a hivemind of mutants. This entirely eliminated the muddle that is personal liberty. Eigong’s final decree was the subjugation of Solarians to this transfiguration. Eigong commits to eugenics.
In 1972, author Hong Shidi published a biography on Qin Shi Huang, sparking a reevaluation of his legacy. No mention was made of his quest for Penglai, nor the cinnabar thought to bestow immortality. Though previously thought of as a tyrant, increasingly hostile against any who he thought might pose the risk of assassination, this biography painted him as a righteous emperor who unified China. Sure, he was alleged to have burned books and persecuted intellectuals, but in rejecting the past, in looking towards the future, he created a centralized nation. Several years prior in 1969, Mao Zedong bragged, “He buried 460 scholars alive; we have buried forty-six thousand scholars alive… You [intellectuals] revile us for being Qin Shi Huangs. You are wrong. We have surpassed Qin Shi Huang a hundredfold.” It should come as little surprise that Hong Shidi’s revisionist biography was published not by a private publishing group, but by the People’s Republic of China under Zedong’s rule.
It was around this same time that early conversations arose regarding China’s birth rates. These discussions would soon result in China’s one-child policy. We’re most intimately familiar with this policy through its more common portrayals and dialogs; like a preference for sons over daughters leading to a generation of missing Chinese women. Little do we speak of the more horrifying parts of this policy: the enforcement. The fines that vastly exceeded the nation’s average salary were an efficient deterrent, but the forced sterilizations of men and women across the country proved more successful. Ruled by fear, people turned to “back alley” abortion methods if an unlawful pregnancy was discovered, such as “blister beetles” that more often than not killed both fetus and mother. It wasn’t until 2002, the same year Qin Shi Huang’s bamboo responses were recovered, that China outlawed physical force as a means to make women submit to an abortion or sterilization.
Eugenics, by its most charitable definition, is a means to rid the world of genetically transmitted ailments, or disease altogether. And truly, imagine the world we could live in if things like cancer could be permanently eradicated! The tricky thing is: who gets to decide what things will be erased? What single person can be entrusted to lead the whole of humanity into an enlightened future? History is filled with conflicts fought over the notion of superiority, ranging from ethnicity to religion to political ideology. It’s doubtful that anyone could be relied upon to not repeat these mistakes. Even if you could, how do you enforce it? Mass sterilization campaigns? The genetic transmutation of the human race into a collective consciousness?
Eugenics is nothing more than an engineered utopia.
Mao Zedong’s totalitarian government claimed the lives of tens of millions through his Cultural Revolution, and continued to haunt China even after his death in 1976. While the one-child policy was not officially in place until three years after Mao’s demise, the birth planning policies that laid the groundwork for forced sterilization campaigns passed under his rule. The Communist Party would later claim the Cultural Revolution as “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the people, the country, and the party since the founding of the People’s Republic.”
The Taiwanese development studio behind Nine Sols, Red Candle Games, released the horror game Devotion in 2019. Hidden within the game was an art asset, a seemingly innocuous poster, which referred to Xi Jinping, the President of the People’s Republic of China, as Winnie the Pooh. Devotion was shortly thereafter delisted from Steam. This isn’t the first time the leader has been compared to the character, though, and it isn’t the first time that the nation has censored these comparisons. The current Chinese government is infamously ruthless in the means it employs censorship—and it’s one of least egregious pursuits that China has adopted under Xi Jinping’s rule. The most diabolic measures surround the treatment of Uighurs: a Muslim minority group native to the Xinjiang region of the country. The Chinese government has forced Uighurs into detention camps and in some cases forcibly sterilized the women held within. Eugenics in China did not end with the repealing of the one-child policy. In 2022, Human Rights Watch estimated that half a million Uighurs were imprisoned. There have been no reports to suggest there has been any form of release from these prisons.
Yi’s final clash with Eigong ends prematurely. She has exposed herself to the same genetic mutations that created what she proclaimed is the next step in Solarian evolution, and attempts to assimilate herself into New Kunlun’s core—thereby infecting all who lie dormant in cryosleep. Yi sacrifices himself, detonating the equivalent of a nuclear bomb to prevent this mass transmutation. New Kunlun is destroyed, and with it, any trace of eugenics or engineered utopia.
Shuanshuan, along with the rest of the captive humans, were jettisoned away from New Kunlun prior to the blast. Their escape ship carried them away from the horrors they’d been subjected to, and mankind arrived on planet Earth. They’re home for the first time in centuries.
Under Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Taoism was targeted as part of a sweeping campaign against old customs. Taoist priests were sent to labor camps, and sites of worship were destroyed or converted for secular purposes. In the following reform period, Taoism regained a slow but steady footing in China. In the wake of the engineered utopia, the natural one was allowed to grow.
After the credits of Nine Sols roll, the player is taken back to the start screen. Before starting the game for the first time, we’re shown a cave that we would soon come to learn as the place where Yi spent his centuries-long rejuvenation. After finishing Nine Sols, we see a human settlement—the one the escapees established after leaving New Kunlun. It looks serene and peaceful.
Nine Sols is a giant departure from Red Candle Game’s prior two titles, both horror focused games—but there’s a consistent throughline between them. Detention and Devotion are inseparable from their Taiwanese influence, painting sometimes brutal portrayals of what life on the politically contested island can be like. Red Candle Games has held back none of its punches when addressing the reason for these conditions: the imperialist occupying force of China. Eugenics, whether it be through genetic modification, forced sterilization, or a hive mind consciousness, is plain and clear genocide. The extinction of a cultural identity like Taiwan involves less explicit bloodshed—but it’s still a genocide. Nine Sols pleads with us to recognize the false promises delivered by these engineered utopias. It admits that their upheaval will take immense effort, trial, and tribulation. But it shows us that what we can achieve in the wake of all of this struggle—the natural utopia—is infinitely better than whatever deranged warmongers can promise us, whether they live in New Kunlun or the Hundred Acre Wood.
Perry Gottschalk is a Paste intern, thinking about games and the way they make us feel. For more feelings, follow @gottsdamn on Twitter.