January 13th, 2026

Science, Taoism, and Incest

Nine Sols is a 2d metroidvania with a sleek artstyle that prides itself on it's Sekiro influence. It is a difficult game, so be warned before you start playing it. It's also fairly linear. The gameplay is good, and I feel like the final boss fight really leans into the thematics of the game quite well.

As the title suggests, Nine Sols is a game with an incest crack ship and focus on a dichotomy between science and taoism (at least as described in game, I'm not a taoist scholar) as well as questions about the anthropocentric worldview more common since the enlightenment era. Nine Sols posits through it's main (dynamic) character and playable protagonist Yi that science can be used to achieve great things for people (or solarians, cat people effectively in the universe of Nine Sols). He is often played opposite his sister Heng, who is a Taoist. There are also the titular "Nine Sols" that typically conflict with Yi's existing beliefs on vengance, science, progress, and meaning, evolving over the course of the game until you reach Eigong, who is just Yi from the beginning of the game. Yi and Heng have a lot of chemistry together, where Yi is kind of dumb and Heng is almost always right, but there's a complication in the setting and the major question: Heng has decided to wait for the end of the world on the Solarian homeworld of Penglai, and Yi wants to save the Solarian species through science and research.

Being anti-incest is an inherently eugencist position. Assuming the two are both consenting adults, nothing should stop them from mating with each other besides respect for the gene pool, or its effects on the "Human Project" should such a thing even exist. The steelman position Heng and Yi represent (and I believe the authors take) is that anthropocentrism is a political position. If you choose the anthropocentric ending, you get a good ending still, same as if you choose one that is non-anthropocentric, it just reflects the position you take to get to that ending. I think this is quite clever. It doesn't say you should wait for the end of the world. It doesn't say you should sacrifice everything to live. It says that things are complicated and whichever you choose, you're making a political statement about how things aught to be. It was almost enough to convince me to understand inaction but, I think as a good Sadean, I have a duty to only believe in things which are self-empowering, like my own superstardom. The taoist concept of virtue is also interesting because it proposes that the primary failure of the Sols was not "Modesty" for the sake of others, but "Modesty" for themselves.