The Rare Nine

I have a soft spot for the games that exist quietly at the bottom of Steam's discovery queue, the ones a single developer pushed out into the world with obvious love and zero marketing budget. The Rare Nine is exactly that kind of game. It is a 2D side-scrolling beat 'em up set inside an endless skyscraper packed with undead, built by a solo developer under the Agafonoff name and released in Early Access back in 2017. The community around it is small, the review count sits around 30 users with a mixed split, and yet the people who stuck around clearly had something to say. The hook is speed. Where most beat 'em ups let you settle into a rhythm, this one demands constant motion. Each run starts with a character pick, and the roster is not cosmetic. One fighter is fast but paper-thin, another hits hard but lumbers through rooms. Learning the feel of each one is its own short puzzle. Once you are in the skyscraper, the Wheel of Fortune hands you a random objective - kill a quota of enemies, survive a wave, hit a time target - which keeps individual sessions from feeling like repetition. Artifacts dropped from enemies or environmental objects stack on top, shifting your build and sometimes completely reorienting how you play. It is a rougher, more chaotic version of the loop you find in games that fold roguelite randomness into action brawling. The damage model is the part that surprised me most. Getting hit is not just a health-bar problem. Temporary status effects like bleeding, poisoning, and slowed movement punish careless play in ways you feel immediately. Broken bones are a permanent debuff that persist for the rest of the run, quietly wrecking the character you spent time calibrating. That layer of consequence separates this from pure button-mashing and makes positioning matter more than the frenetic pace might suggest. After boss fights, you spend cash dropped by enemies on upgrades, giving each run a small progression arc that softens the difficulty curve if you are careful with your money. What holds the whole thing together is the aesthetic. The pixel art uses a tight, restricted color palette that gives rooms a gritty underground-arcade feel, and every environment is dense with destructible objects. The chiptune soundtrack is the strongest single element, genuinely composed rather than assembled. It keeps the tempo of each session honest and gives the game a personality that a lot of indie brawlers with bigger budgets never find. That said, The Rare Nine has real rough edges. The Steam community has flagged a game-speed bug on modern hardware where the engine runs wildly fast, which requires a manual fix. Development appears to have stalled, with community posts noting the game has gone quiet. You are buying what exists, not a roadmap. For players who love the era of arcade side-scrollers and do not need a game to hold their hand or promise future content, there is something genuinely charming here. The ambition and the execution do not always meet, but the craft underneath is sincere. That counts for something in my book.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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