Recent reviews by 深秘を曝け! 秘封倶楽部

Despite many present signs pointing to the contrary, this game is a reminder that Mica Team can cook. This game has that magical knack for throwing seemingly-impossible odds at you and giving you just enough leeway to eke out a victory. A strategy game and a story game that I can recommend with my chest out.
I've never been so happy to play Chinese Novels in my life

Lovely little meal of a game. It's refreshing to have a short bespoke game to work through in a single sitting and come out delighted by SOMI's storytelling touch.

They got me

instant platforming dopamine that you can boot up at any time and get mad at for USD$3 (USD$2 on sale), perfect fidget toy for me

from one of the contributors of UFO50

nier automata yuri

God it feels good to use your resources F yes you should play Blue Revolver

From the developer that brought you "Scrandle"

Speaking as someone who's only seen a very limited, Western slice of the Touhou fangame ecosystem, I feel that we might be a little spoiled for choice for Touhou fangames. We've got Touhou tower defense, Touhou idle games, Touhou WarioWare, Touhou Metroidvania, Touhou Ys, Touhou Vampire Survivors, Touhou Slay the Spire, Touhou platform fighters -- every ♥♥♥♥♥-basic genre of a video game, easily broken down and mined for video game mechanics with which to scratch the self-proclaimed Touhou fan's dopamine itch; imitative pastiche with a cursory skin of Touhou flavour to please the eye, for the community to raise up and pride ourselves over.

I don't mean to paint this phenomenon in a negative light; this is a remarkable aspect of our doujin community. "Rule ⑨: There's a Touhou version for everything." However, take into account the context of this ecosystem that you've idly kept an eye on for many years, and I say this -- this game stands out. It is - to be sure - linear to a fault, and easy to the point of being nearly impossible to lose. If you wanted to call it a walking simulator, I would have no grounds to deny you. However, calling it a "walking simulator" undermines the grace, the suspense - the fundamental desire within any story to see what happens next - that this game accomplishes simply through walking. Watching Flandre's walk cycle impresses upon the player a certain dedication of the developer to their craft. This smoothly animated action, accompanied by footsteps, forms the bulk of this game, and it never feels lacking.

Linear this game may be, yes - but you could also say that it is direct - to the point. If a game with this much walking forced you to backtrack and explore every nook and cranny with an item collector's obsessive compulsion, it would have dragged on and infuriated me. Instead, this game, with its modest 2 hour length, feels like a brisk, refreshing jaunt. Whatever detail a lesser game might have packed into scattered collectibles such as audio logs and diary scraps - Bioshock or The Elder Scrolls-style - has instead been dedicated towards packing delightful bits of visual detail into the scenery of this walking game.

As a pixel art game, this game is remarkable. It's thoroughly pleasant to look at the whole way through. The visual effects are simple, but not overdone; the direction of sound, lighting, and pacing serve to create a tension thick enough to engross, yet gentle enough as to not scare away the pansiest of players (such as myself (lol)). This presentation is as much as I can ask for from a solo dev work. Full marks.

However, the most standout aspect of this game is its strangeness, its refusal to adhere to a typical Touhou fangame mold. It simply wishes to do something else. Experimental, daring even. It is eminently palpable from every moment of play that Letter_w seeks to capture a particular vision - a particular story for this character, Flandre, that they have a madman's attachment to - and they did so not by adhering to familiar Touhou tropes of plot or setting or game mechanics, but by keeping the things they wanted to keep and throwing the rest out.

Look at this plethora of minigame mechanics that get used just once and never come up again.
Look at this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gun Flandre gets to pick up and use exactly once.
Look at this random poster reference to VA-11 Hall-A and Girls' Last Tour the dev put in because they wanted to.
It's beautiful. I want to see more.

It is purely, truly outsider art. I might even go as far as to argue that the roughness of the English translation (and indeed, it is rough) only serves to enhance the mysticism of this outsider work from the Chinese doujin sphere.
If you don't have like 5 bucks to throw at an indie dev then fine, spend it on something else. If you're a ♥♥♥♥♥♥' poindexter who's built an Excel spreadsheet to calculate the price to hours-playtime score of every game in your library then fine, go fist yourself.
But at least take a moment to consider putting down your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gacha games, your screenshake-enhanced number-go-up treadmills, and checking this ♥♥♥♥ out. You ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ art-starved ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. You don't know what you're missing out on. This was an excellent 2 hour game.

This games pretty good

Somehow I feel like I like this game even more than Murasaki Tsurugi, and I like Tsurugi

* Note: The singular Steam guide for this game contains a variety of helpful hints and easter eggs, give it a read

Singleplayer campaign: Its aight