9 Years of Shadows

I recently completed 9 Years of Shadows in roughly 12 hours, earning 28 out of 34 achievements. For players chasing the platinum trophy, everything appears achievable in a single playthrough in around 16 hours, with no missable trophies that I could identify. The game is an excellent Metroidvania in the classic sense. The platforming feels tight and responsive, backtracking is well-integrated, and the boss design is consistently strong throughout. The game opens in a muted, colorless world before gradually blooming into something colorfully striking. After a brief tutorial, you’re guided toward key progression abilities. Once you obtain a new ability, the game opens up and encourages you to backtrack and explore previously inaccessible areas. Exploration is one of the game’s strongest aspects, though a few sections can feel confusing or poorly signposted. Combat is generally forgiving. Most enemies aren’t particularly threatening and will respawn if you leave and re-enter a room. However, certain rooms can still feel challenging due to enemy placement and density. The game features an elemental damage system with four armor types (lightning, water, fire, and earth). Enemies have clear weaknesses and resistances, which adds a nice layer of strategy. Optional NPC questlines exist, but they primarily revolve around defeating optional bosses. You can upgrade your health (“Light”) by collecting blue notes and your vitality (extra lives) by collecting red notes. Main bosses are the game’s biggest challenge and usually have nearby checkpoints. Optional and mini-bosses tend to lack checkpoints and often feature recognizable gimmicks or patterns. The story is quiet but emotionally resonant. It isn’t grand or epic but it tells a beautiful, intimate tale centered on love, family, and loss. That said, the game does have some noticeable flaws. The save system is the most frustrating: progress is only saved at checkpoints and after defeating bosses. There is no autosave or manual saving, so dying while exploring a new area can force you to repeat large sections. The elevators connecting major areas also overstay their welcome. Early on, they’re somewhat mitigated by the protagonist’s inner monologue, but later they become long, silent loading sequences. You can skip them, but they still feel unnecessarily slow. The health system is also unusual. The more health you have, the harder it becomes to recover it. On the positive side, I encountered no bugs or glitches throughout my playthrough. The game ran smoothly from start to finish. Overall, 9 Years of Shadows is a very strong Metroidvania. If you enjoy the genre, it’s well worth playing. My final score is 9/10.

[b]“Am I having a stroke?”[/b] [i]-Jane 9YearsOfShadows after everyone treating the phantom stuffed bear as a common occurence[/i] [hr][/hr] Usually indie games sacrifice good graphics to focus on developing good gameplay, [b]9 Years of Shadows[/b] goes to the other route instead, making itself pretty for the trailers but ending up as having almost no substance. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] It’s metroidvania, so you know the gist, progression isn’t rolled out in form of keys that unlock doors but gameplay additions, such as double jump, floating and so on, to traverse the environment in ways to access previously unavailable part of a large map due to them being either a jump too far or a slow fall too short. [h1]Story[/h1] A woman decides to enter a tower to end a 9-year long curse, with the help of a teddy bear The story itself is told through banter with bosses and small interactions with NPCs, as well as “elevator scenes” where one of the fast travel methods doubles as giving room for the main character to collect her thoughts on the happenings. [h1]X-Factor[/h1] The art is beautiful, take any other negative review and they all mention this as the game’s strongest point. [h1]Downsides[/h1] Fighting enemies doesn’t feel too good, I’m not against the player having a single attack in their repertoire if enemies had interesting moveset to be the focus if a fight instead, but here that’s not the case either. Having only 2 hitpoints and tying your main way to resist damage to an easily replenishable energy bar sure is a choice, not bad per se, but makes most of the game absolutely trivial, but SOME bosses that can attack faster than your replenishing mean that a 5-minute-long fight can instantly end if the boss throws you a bad pattern. There’s a dodge, but it’s so short and doesn’t integrate itself well with your moveset. The new traversal methods the game adds to call itself a metroidvania are either nothing to write home about or extremely unfun to use, who thought that a plunging attack shouldn’t be done by pressing attack and down midair and instead by pressing jump and down and only after a double jump? Story has zero setup, it feels like you’re reading the ripped-out pages of the very last book of a series making the pacing incredibly weird where it’s not elaborating on crucial events to flesh out the world, instead focusing on the most generic banter. The game is riddled with bugs, hardlocks, and a horrible constant screen tearing even with vsync on. Camera is maybe the worst offender as it doesn’t follow smoothly the player but abruptly starts and stops making the meticulously crafted pixelart a blurry mess. [hr][/hr] The art team behind the game spritework really got shafted, dabbling in pixel art myself I can see an incredible amount of beautiful work squandered on some below mediocre game design and programming, if there’s any takeaway you should hire the guys who have done the visuals for this game. Get it only if you’re absolutely starving for metroidvanias.

Acabo de terminarlo y me encantó. Como fan de los metroidvania, no decepciona para nada. La mecánica de cambiar de elementos me pareció excelente, no solo para pelear, sino para explorar, ya que el mapa aprovecha muy bien cada habilidad. La historia engancha sin bajones, el arte es bellísimo y la banda sonora está sencillamente god. Muy recomendado si te gusta el género. ¡Le doy un 10/10! (Pd: Me tiene como loco buscando las últimas 2 notas musicales que me faltan para el platino aaaaaa).

Well the move in the game is called lullaby.. which must be true because it made me fall asleep. Got it on fanatical dirt cheap otherwise I’d have never played this lol

The Pixel Art is beautiful and the story is simple but meaningful. I love the sense of progression in this game where it makes you feel like you're unlocking new powers every 15 mins. It's one of those little compelling games you're glad you completed.

i forget i have the game i but it because hollow knight and not even 1% from the game

A visually beautiful game with questionable gameplay design decisions that make it feel like an unfinished buggy mess. There's no doubt that 9 Years of Shadows is very pretty. It does not shy away from using vibrant colors and designs. Clearly a lot of work and thought was put into the backgrounds and textures. However, the eye candy hides some issues that are constantly nitpicking at you. - First and foremost: the shield system. The recharge minigame aspect constantly draws your focus and attention away from the combat. This is conflicting because you have to pay attention to two things now: the enemy AND yourself. I don't want to take my eyes off the enemy because I NEED to know what they're doing. But if I don't pay attention to recharging my shield, then I risk myself taking further damage anyway. - The save system. Outside of bosses, there is no autosave system. Meaning if you die, you have to re-explore everything after your last manual save (you can only save in certain rooms). At least have autosave every few rooms or something? - The fast travel. There is a noticeable delay after using the elevator where you cannot open the map. - Room interactions. Sometimes you cannot interact with the elevator or NPCs, even though you are in range. By themselves, each are tolerable. But altogether, each occurring multiple times throughout one's playthrough? A death by a thousand cuts. The game itself feels somewhat short, so I will finish it anyway. But this is a terrible experience for the average person. Definitely needed more time to cook.

El arte es precioso, junto con la música. Pero tiene demasiados bugs. No pude pasar de la pantalla final por lo mismo.