9th Dawn Remake

My instinct when I see a solo-developer open-world RPG is cautious optimism shading into scepticism, because ambition and follow-through are different things. After spending serious time with 9th Dawn Remake, I can report that Valorware's British one-man studio, Tom Au, has pulled off something genuinely worth paying attention to, even if it comes with the rough edges you'd expect from a micro-team swinging for a very large target. The core loop is a 2.5D top-down action RPG where you move through a sprawling open world, descend into 45 dungeons, and kill things until better gear drops. Combat controls are twin-stick in spirit: movement on one side, directional attacks on the other, with weapon-swapping and dodge rolls layered on top. The depth comes not from combat complexity but from the sheer volume of build options. There is a massive gear loadout covering four ring slots, head, arms, necklace, boots, body, bow, arrows, two relic slots, and two weapon slots simultaneously. Weapon proficiency improves through use rather than class selection, so the build you end up with at hour 30 can look completely different from the one you started with. Pets evolve through a separate talent tree and drop from random egg finds rather than traditional taming, which keeps loot runs feeling unpredictable in a good way. Three difficulty settings and toggleable enemy density mean you can tune the experience for grinding comfort or punishment depending on your tolerance for spongy mobs on Hard mode. Where 9th Dawn Remake gets genuinely weird is in its embedded mini-games. Deck Rock is a Slay the Spire-adjacent card game where you build decks to push through dungeons, entirely separate from the main quest. Fishing Survivors wraps a bullet-heaven survival mechanic around the act of catching fish. Both are optional and both are time sinks in their own right: at least one reviewer admitted to sinking five hours into Deck Rock before realising it had nothing to do with the main story. Community reception on these is split. Some players love the variety; others find the card game drags too long and the fishing mini-game samey after a few runs, though the developer has continued patching and rebalancing both since launch. The honest critique is on the narrative side, which is where I personally feel the gap most. The story involves a missing lighthouse keeper that spirals into a larger mystery, and the setup has bones worth exploring. But the quest log is light on detail, character interactions are thin, and the world does not reward reading between the lines the way I want an RPG world to. If your primary reason for playing RPGs is branching narrative and dialogue with real weight, 9th Dawn Remake will underserve you. The monster design compounds this: enemies feel anonymous across the board, and bosses do not deliver the memorable encounters the dungeon count implies. That said, the world is enormous, with a fog-of-war map that opens slowly and a completion tracker per area that scratches the completionist itch without resorting to manufactured filler quests. Post-launch support has been active. The developer shipped dozens of updates in the first week alone, and community feedback on Steam points to meaningful QoL changes continuing into 2026. The Steam rating sits at 86% positive across over 500 reviews, which for an indie at this scope is a healthy signal. It also runs well with controller support, cloud saves, and verified performance on portable hardware. Co-op, both local split-screen and online, works and makes the dungeon runs considerably more fun. If you are a dungeon crawler player who measures value in hours-per-pound and enjoys building out a character through loot discovery rather than narrative investment, this delivers. If you come to RPGs for writing that rewards re-reads, look elsewhere first. Monika, Scout Team