Greetings, everyone!

As we kick off 2024, we want to express our sincere gratitude for your ongoing support and feedback. Over the past few months, we've diligently reviewed your reports, and we're thrilled to share the latest enhancements we've made to elevate your gaming experience.

Here are the key highlights:

• Auto-save now triggers after defeating any mid-boss or final boss.

• Resolved an issue where "Next dialogue" or "Skip dialogue" inputs weren't functioning correctly.
  
• Addressed a controller settings bug affecting hierarchy-based inputs, such as the dialogue system.
  
• Fixed a texture issue with the VFX on the strong attack of the Helios Upgraded armor.
  
• Rectified a texture problem with the central projectile in the Gear of Erebus battle.
  
• [Solved a bug where fire bullets failed to explode from the Vlastor Pyro.
  
• Corrected an enemy placement issue in the Portrait of Demise that caused coins to become stuck in a Gaia tunnel.
  
• Eliminated a bug that automatically skipped the prologue's first elevator dialogue.
  
• Fixed an issue causing some Steam achievements not to unlock as intended.

• Enjoy a fresh set of sound effects for the Logon Duck's spinning razor attack.
  
• Witness art improvements across various rooms in all areas.

For those eager to connect with our development team, report issues, or engage with our community, please join our Discord channel. Your continued support fuels our commitment to delivering the best gaming experience possible.

And today, we have additional great news!
We're being featured in a Metroidvania Souls-like bundle on Steam! Go check it out:

https://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/bundle/38214/Metroidvania_SoulsLike_Bundle/


Thank you for being part of our journey!

Hi everyone! If you were thinking about getting the game, now is a great time to do so as we are part of the Steam Winter Sale through our publisher Freedom Games!

From December 21st until January 4th, the game will be on sale for 30% off!

Make sure to check out Freedom Games' Winter Sale 2023 page to pick up some great games to play over the holiday season. Whether you like to play alone or with friends, there are some great deals you won't want to miss out on!


https://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/app/1402120/9_Years_of_Shadows/

If you want to join the community, follow us on Twitter, TikTok[www.tiktok.com], Instagram[www.instagram.com], Facebook[www.facebook.com], YouTube and join our Discord![discord.gg]

Thanks for your support and we’re super excited to show off all of our hard work!

Hello everyone!

We kindly ask for your support in recommending 9 Years of Shadows as a nominee for the 'Outstanding Visual Style' category in 'The Steam Awards 2023!'

The nomination period starts now and runs for one week. Let's showcase the true power of our community!

Thank you for your support! 💕

Hello everyone!

We hope you're all doing well. It's been a month since our last update, and since then, we have continued to work on improving performance and stabilizing the experience on Steam Deck.

We thank you again for your patience, empathy, and feedback while we fix and enhance the game experience.

If you want to talk with our dev team, report an issue, or join the community, please join[discord.gg] our Discord! We'd love to hear from you all!

• Fixed a bug that caused videos to crash on Steam Deck.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused armor unlock cinematics to not show.
  
• Fixed numerous bugs that prevented the text from displaying correctly during the prologue and epilogue slideshows.
  
• Some elemental outline effects were not displaying correctly.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the sound volume level and settings UI to not report the same value.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused text to fade in incorrectly during elemental animations.
  
• Fixed some placement errors for localized text on the status screen.

• Minor room layout fixes in Area E.
  
• Art adjustments in various rooms across all areas.
  
• Missing sound effects were re-added for some of Europa’s actions.
  
• Missing UI sound effects were added.

Hi everyone!

We're excited to announce that 9 Years of Shadows will be showcased at DreamHack Beyond on August 18th-27th, 2023!

Check out the Summer Indie Showcase at https://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/curator/40157993/sale/DreamHackBeyondSummerIndieShowcase . We’re super excited to see you!

If you want to join the community, follow us on Twitter, TikTok[www.tiktok.com], Instagram[www.instagram.com], Facebook[www.facebook.com], YouTube and join our Discord![discord.gg]

Thanks for your support and we’re super excited to show off all of our hard work!

Hello everyone!

Thanks for all the support and continuous feedback you are giving us. We have another small patch today to continue our efforts of giving you all the best experience.

• A bug causing Europa in the Portrait of Demise to soft-lock by shattering a crystal ability vase is now fixed
  
• A new fix for the achievements of "Big Kitty" and "No More Nightmares" has been applied to be unlocked by entering the correct save file

Hello everyone!

Support and feedback from all of you guys have been incredible after the patch from last week!

Thanks for being patient while we create new fixes and solutions for the game. We've got a new small patch today to continue our efforts of giving you all the best experience.

• Added support for VSync and fixed frame rates.

• A bug causing Europa in Serpent Form to be blocked in a tunnel path in Sector E has been fixed.
  
• A fix has been applied for missing Japanese and Chinese font characters in dialogue and menus.
  
• A fix has been applied to retroactively unlock missing achievements "Big Kitty" and "No More Nightmares" by entering the save log with the progression.

Hello everyone! We hope you're all doing well. It's been a month since our last update, where we shared that we have been working on some performance fixes and optimizing general assets throughout the game.

We thank you for your patience and empathy while we work on new fixes and ways to make the game feel better.

If you want to talk with our dev team, report an issue, or join the community, please join our Discord[discord.gg]! We'd love to hear from you all!

• A new visual aid for the light bar has been added when Europa is performing Lullaby or Radical Acceptance.
  
• Radical Acceptance "sweet spot" is now always positioned in the middle of the recovery bar.
  
• Radical Acceptance now recovers less light if it is used immediately consecutively.
  
• The shield recovery speed values have been adjusted for the final armor set.
  
• Health and damage values have been rebalanced and adjusted for all bosses, mid-bosses, and enemies.
  
• The Final Battle and Logon Duck boss fights have been rebalanced based on changes to health recovery mechanics.
  
• The Hekate's Illusion boss has a new attack.

• Painting portals have been updated.
  
• Incorrect elevator cinematic animations have been fixed.
  
• Fixes for some of the art assets in the Theater / Workshop.

• "Falling Stars" attack in the final battle has had a crash bug fixed.
  
• A crash bug related to particles spawning on heat currents has been fixed.
  
• A bug causing the shield recovery bar to appear while Europa has the final armor upgrade has been fixed.
  
• A fix has been applied to ensure the Tantalus Roach boss arena door opens consistently.
  
• A fix has been applied to prevent the Heart of Talos from spawning a shield effect during battle.
  
• The music looping bug in the painting area of Sector E has been fixed.
  
• The animation delay when saving the game has been corrected.

• Enemy sprite sheets had compression improvements.
  
• Object Pooling has been enhanced to reduce lag by pre-loading common objects (such as attack slashes).
  
• Reduced build size on disk by 6.2 GB thanks to optimizing files, sprite sheets, textures, and materials.

Hello everyone; we hope you’re all doing well! Summer is fast approaching, and with it, we want to address our focus to improve the game’s performance.

If you played 9 Years of Shadows recently, you’ve noticed we uploaded a localization patch, which includes French, German, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese as available languages.

We also uploaded several bug fixes across the different patches, most of which solved technical issues due to game optimization. We have been fixing another batch of various bugs and performance issues and are now in a testing phase to check that everything is in order.

However, we know that some of you have encountered crashes in certain areas, so we wanted to reassure you of our commitment to solving them and working on solutions to prevent future crashes from happening again.

We thank everyone who has taken the time to report their problems and continue supporting us as we work towards making the game smoother with each patch.

The following are the main improvements of the past few weeks that will be present in an upcoming patch:

• Fixed bug RAM issue that was causing some players to encounter problems due to memory leak
  
• Improved the loading system to be more efficient with big textures and assets
  
• Compressed the executable size of the game to reduce space
  
• Improved performance in intensive areas and battles in the game
  
• Improved texture sizes to reduce spike lags