The Rare Nine is a laughably badly made abandoned Early Access 2D retro pixel side scrolling arcade brawler with lightweight adventure game elements. Gameplay, if you can get the game to work, involves running around madly mashing buttons to try fight hordes of badly done 2D retro pixel zombies... this is just garbage.
The game was abandoned roughly 4 months after launch and hasn't been updated in 5 years, it's dead. The game will never be completed. This should have been pretty apparent when the game launched because the developer dodged Valve's requirement for developers under Early Access to provide an ETA... and wouldn't you know it, they followed through by dodging their obligation to finish the game, instead opting to take gamers money and run for the hills. The absolute state of amateur "indie" developers right here, folks.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs. Amusingly, there's a long list of credits for this abandoned game, but of course the developer didn't bother to credit Yoyogames, who did 99% of the work on the game through GMS.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 4 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Unethically, the developer sold keys to this abandoned Early Access game into cheap, nasty game bundles, where they knew it would be advertised and sold as a complete PC game. This seems to have been done in an attempt to mislead gamers into buying a knowingly faulty, defective and incomplete product. When a developer does this for a game they have zero practical intention of completing, this is essentially a scam, an intention to get paid for a broken/unfinished product. This appears to have been done as an exit strategy, as the developer took the money and ran. No refunds have been given, the developer kept all the money they took from gamers.
The Rare Nine is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend.
