How Long to Beat Nine Sols: 20-25 Hours + 100%

Nine Sols takes most players 20 to 25 hours to beat the main story. Chase every Battle Memory fight, lore fragment, and hidden corner and you're looking at 30 to 40 hours for full completion.

The range is wide because of one thing: the combat. Nine Sols runs on deflection, and how fast you learn to parry a boss's pattern decides whether your playthrough runs long or short.

How long to beat Nine Sols

Goal	Time
Main story	20-25 hours
Main story + side content	25-30 hours
Full completion	30-40 hours
Prologue (Jade Stream)	1-1.5 hours

These numbers hold for a player who's never touched the game before. Genre veterans who've already got parry timing from Sekiro or Hollow Knight tend to land at the low end.

What affects your playtime

Nothing moves the number more than boss fights. Nine Sols is built around deflection — you parry, bank qi, and spend it to punish — and every boss is a pattern you either learn fast or die to repeatedly. A boss that takes one player five attempts can eat an hour of another player's evening.

Difficulty is the honest reason this game varies so much between players. It's harder than most Metroidvanias, and it doesn't apologize for that. If you'd rather see the story and world without grinding through boss deaths, Story Mode lets you turn down enemy damage and health. It doesn't shrink the map or cut content — it just removes the retry loop that's normally where the extra hours live.

Exploration adds its own chunk of time. New abilities open old rooms, and Nine Sols hides a good amount behind talismans and side paths you won't see on a first pass through an area. Completionists revisiting the map for every Battle Memory encounter and lore entry are where the run stretches from 25 hours toward 40.

The prologue in Jade Stream is short on purpose — an hour, maybe ninety minutes — because Red Candle Games wants you parrying before you've had time to second-guess it.

Is it worth the time?

Yes, if the deflection combat clicks for you or you're willing to let Story Mode smooth it out. The boss design here is some of the best in the genre — long, readable fights where a clean deflection run feels earned rather than lucky — and the story, unusually for this genre, is actually worth following to the end.

The honest caveat: if parrying never clicks, the mid-game bosses will stop you cold no matter how much you explore elsewhere. That's the trade the whole game is built on. For the fuller case on who should buy it, see our Nine Sols worth-it verdict.

How it compares to similar games

• Hollow Knight runs a bit longer at 25-30 hours for the main story, with dodge-based combat instead of Nine Sols' parry system — a bigger map, a gentler combat curve.
• Blasphemous sits close in tone and difficulty at 12-18 hours for the main story, shorter overall but similarly punishing on bosses.
• Ender Magnolia: Heir of Amnesia trades Nine Sols' combat intensity for atmosphere, running 15-20 hours with far less boss pressure.

Nine Sols sits mid-pack on raw hours but near the top of the genre on how much of that time is boss-driven. If you want more games built the same way, we cover eight of them in games like Nine Sols.

If deflection combat and a world worth exploring are your thing, KUTO: The Lock of Time is worth a look too. It's a time-bending action Metroidvania where you play Jokoan Kuto, wielding the Scythe of Kronos and time abilities like Recall and Dilation across a die-and-retry loop that keeps your progress between runs. Wishlist it on Steam ahead of Early Access.