Red Candle Games hasn’t been taken kindly to the Asian country, but the Taiwanese studio hasn’t given up either.

You might know Red Candle Games via Devotion. It was an atmospheric horror game released in 2019, but it caused a scandal among Chinese gamers, as it had unfavourable references towards Xi Jinping, China’s presitator-for-life. The situation led to negative reviews on Steam, and the Chinese publisher lost its license, but after two years, the studio began selling Devotion directly from its website. The Taiwanese team has previously explained that the references that upset the Chinese players were temporary, placeholder assets…

However, the team is working on a new game, and it feels different from their previous creations. Devotion and its predecessor Detention were survival horror titles, but the studio described Nine Sols as something with a Taopunk setting. Genre-wise, it’s a two-dimensional platformer with deflection-focused combat inspired by Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. You can get a strong sense of the dynamic gameplay in the video below, which was perhaps last seen in Hollow Knight.

Red Candle Games has launched a crowdfunding campaign that has been such a success that there are still 48 days to go, it is already at 135% of its goal of 3 million Taiwanese dollars (about 105K USD). In other words, there is demand, and not a tiny amount of it, and the developers are not asking for that much money to make the game happen. For around 20 USD, you can get a digital copy of the game, but in the 1K plus category (which is already sold out), you can also be the co-writer of a short in-game story.

Nine Sols doesn’t have a release date, but if it’s this successful in getting funding, it will undoubtedly smooth the way for what is sure to be a PC , PlayStation and Nintendo Switch game with a maximum extra goal of 20 million Taiwanese dollars (701.6K USD), but what that will be is open to question.

Source: PCGamer