A world cursed and trapped in a monochromatic world, Europa, with nothing left to lose decides to venture forth to try and bring colour back by stopping the corruption plaguing the Talos. 9 Years of Shadows is an anime inspired, beautifully hand-crafted, 2D metroidvania developed by Halberd Studios and published by JanduSoft S.L. for consoles. This is a port of their 2023 release on PC published by Freedom Games.

📝 STORY  ðŸŒ WORLD

✅ decent story
✅ decent interconnected world
✅ 8 Sections/biomes
✅ well paced, short game

A curse from Talos Castle has hit the world, taking away all life and colour, as well as orphaning our heroine Europa. You start the game in a monochromatic world with nothing but your halberd. When you meet up with the cute and slightly out of place teddy bear named Alpino, the world of colour opens up to you. As you progress, you learn more about the lore, the people that call this place home, warriors and thieves looking to protect or collect the many relics that are in the castle. 

Speaking of the castle, the world is divided into 8 different Sections or biomes. Each biome looks and feels unique with their own set of obstacles, often associated with a dominant element. For example, Section D is called Capra Cauldrons, which means that the dominant element will be fire.

Apart from the lore you collect, the NPCs you meet along the way are the highlight of the story. While not groundbreaking, their characteristics are quirky and fun to read through. They also have their own corresponding side quest that leads to a boss fight. Overall, one thing I did notice as I played through the game, that it doesn't drag, and I received new abilities, discovered new areas, and progressed the game at a relatively quick pace. I never felt lost as to where to go next which is unusual for a metroidvania for me.

🎮 GAMEPLAY

In this 2D metroidvania, you play as a halberd toting warrior named Europa. If you've played any metroidvanias before or are familiar with the genre, 9 Years of Shadows is a very typical game that you can pick up with practically zero learning curve. You progress from screen to screen, completing the map as you go along, platforming, and defeating enemies. And in typical metroidvania fashion, you learn new abilities along the way that improves the way you interact with the world and the enemies within it. 

However there are some interesting mechanics that sets Europa apart, especially with combat:

COMBAT

✅ 4 coloured elemental amours
✅ each has 1 upgrade providing additional charge attack
✅ enemies weak against same colour, but resistant to others
❌ doesn't work vice versa
❌ enemies are few in quantity and variety 
✅ "quick reload" mechanic 
✅ unique shield/power/health management 
✅ cute bear that tags along providing a shield/light power
âž– contact damage 

As you traverse Talos Castle, you encounter armours which serves as one of the main gameplay elements. These armours represent an element that will allow you to attack enemies with the same colour as you. These are Grace of Zeus (lightning/yellow), Poseidon Armor (water/blue), Gaia Armor (earth/green), and Helios Armor (fire/red). Along with these, Alpino also provides you the ability to damage dark elemental (purple) enemies.

Europa also doesn't have the typical health system. You start the game with 2 red gems which signify your vitality, and a light blue gauge  which acts to power Alpino's blast abilities, as well as your shield. When an enemy strikes you or receive environmental damage, the first thing that depletes is your shield. When that is empty, your vitality gems, which you have two of in the beginning are next. This is unique in a way due to your ability to recharge your light bar at anytime by holding a button (R2 on PS5) as well as the ability called Radical Acceptance to perform a quick heal. This is reminiscent to quick reload in games like Returnal allowing you to regain most of your light shield with enough reflex. In essence, this quick heal means you can potentially never lose if you can manage to juggle keeping that shield up between getting hit and using abilities.

These mechanics creates variety in gameplay as it forces you to switch between stances and juggle your resources, however, there are way less enemies in this game in comparison to typical metroidvanias. The Bestiary has about 40 enemies (not including bosses), however, they are just variants for each element, making it approximately 8 enemies for each element (fire, earth, water, lightning, dark). Even the bosses, while unique in the way it asks you to use your armours, It's ultimately a very easy game with traversal being your main obstacle. 

TRAVERSAL

Traversal in 9 Years of Shadow is perhaps one of the most fun thing in the game. The armours you have and the abilities you receive through it, ties real well into the world and the transition within them is near flawless. 

✅ 5 elements play a role as obstacles and ways to overcome them
✅ unique traversal abilities
✅ very fluid transition between each one
❌ not all of them are good and should just not exist (Olympian Dive)
✅ colour coded map complete with a legend
❌ not interactable, no map markers, slow panning
❌ no in-game camera panning
❌ map is deceiving 
❌ LONG load times 

Within the world, you'll encounter 5 main biomes (for each element), along with corresponding obstacles to overcome using your armour's unique traversal abilities that you gain along the way. Aside from the typical double jump you see in almost all metroidvanias, each armour gives you resistance to environmental damage and an ability with the circle button (for PS5) unique to the armour. Gaia Armor, for example, allows entry into poisonous rooms and interact with green switches. However, its secondary ability turns you into a serpent, allowing you access through small tunnels. Alternatively, the Poseidon Armor allows you to traverse through water and interact with blue switches and its alternate ability turns you into a mermaid that makes you a deft swimmer allowing you to swim and dash underwater.

The truly neat thing with these armours is that it doesn't ask you to press a button to switch between them while interacting with the environment. Once you receive the Gaia Armor and enter a poisonous room, you will automatically switch to this armour. And while you are in serpent form and you encounter a waterfall, you are immediately in mermaid form, skipping the necessity to not only switch to Poseidon Armor but also not needing to press Circle. It makes the later game traversal fun, quick and fluid. 

My only complaint about the available abilities is with Olympian Dive. Picture Hollow Knight's downward nail attack allowing you to bounce off of surfaces to give you an extra boost, except for the fact that it feels horrible to use. This is a huge contrast to the other abilities that feels right at home.

With traversal abilities and adventuring through the world feeling good, the overall polish in the game is where it truly takes a hit. Metroidvanias are all about discovering every nook and cranny of the map and back tracking to areas you previously couldn't go through due to missing abilities. This makes mapping one of the main aspects of a metroidvania and is one of the areas where 9 Years of Shadows fails on. Each block represents a room with breaks in the line signifying a door. Attempting to back track and plan your route can be extremely deceiving because not only do these blocks look cramped, a room beside each other with a door connecting the 2 doesn't mean they are accessible by going through that door. It could be separated by obstacles, forcing you to go through 5 other rooms just to get to the one originally beside it. 

This issue is punctuated by the fact that there are no map markers and the unusually long load times. While I am not a trophy hunter, I'm only 2 trophies away from the platinum (I need 1 enemy to complete the bestiary, and 1 collectible to fully upgrade my Light Bar), yet the thought of manually going through each room again to find them is too dreadful that I decided to drop it. 

There are also elevators in the game that takes you to a hand drawn elevator load screen that reveals some lore, letting us into the thoughts of Europa. This is interesting at first, but you quickly run out of the banter, leaving you with silence, however, even using the Skip button, transition takes too long.

Metroidvanias like 9 Years of Shadows needs to feel good to traverse. While they almost succeed in this with their cool traversal abilities, they unfortunately fail on the fundamentals like camera panning, quality of life, and performance.  

🎵 SOUND 🏞️ GRAPHICS

This is probably where 9 Years of Shadows stands out the most, especially garnering some great first impressions which is extremely important for an indie game.

Upon starting the game, you'll be greeted with an anime opening, reminiscent of Sailor Moon meets Saint Seiya!

✅ beautiful hand drawn anime inspired character art
✅ pixelated retro and colourful world
✅ biomes are well designed
✅ Europa is well animated
✅ BGM is surprisingly good
âž– no voice acting, though didn't feel necessary

Europa's character design is a sight to behold. While simple, the transition between each armour is snappy. You can see the different armour on her and her halberd swing animations also differ between each one. My favourite are Europa's well drawn character art for each armour she owns. However, Europa isn't the only well drawn character in the game. Along the way, you'll also meet several NPCs and they received the same treatment in terms of how well they are drawn.

The world in which you discover these NPCs are also very well done. The beautiful hand drawn backgrounds and simple animations creates a good atmosphere. Waterfall animations in one biome can look completely different in another even though you know they are the exact same animation. Even the glittering fireflies animation they use throughout the game is repetitive but makes everything feel magical. Halberd Games did a great job with reusing their assets in multiple ways.

BGM and SFX is another aspect that 9 Years of Shadows did well. Each area has its own distinct sound. And to make it even better, there is a whole set of NPCs dedicated to music as they gather around a theatre preparing for their orchestra. It has some nice and relaxing notes, almost reminiscent of lo-Fi vibes, crisp and satisfying sound effects when hitting enemies or breakables, and the humming of the elevator is truly well done!

While the game has some narrative, the game doesn't have any voice acting, though it never felt like something that was missing.

⚙️ ACCESSIBILITY/OPTIONS

✅ keybinding
✅ vibration and camera shake options
✅ 8 language options 

9 Years of Shadows has 9 language options: English, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, and French

Final Thoughts

9 Years of Shadows is a beautiful game with interesting mechanics. It's filled with great intentions and ideas that were never fully realized. However, even with its glitches, confusingly long load time, and input lag, it was an enjoyable experience, albeit a sometimes frustrating one.

9 Years of Shadows was released on July 31, 2025 to consoles and was played on PlayStation 5 Pro.

It's currently available on PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series/One and Steam