Disclaimer: Touhou Luna Nights is currently released as a demo in early access. This review is based on the content in the game as of its August 20th, 2018 state.

Another month, another Touhou fan project on Steam to get excited about. And you’d better believe I was excited about this one. A 2d Metroidvania game featuring my favorite Touhou character as the protagonist and stunning sprite work? Sign me up. Now, I’m not an early access person since it usually encourages developers to sit on their laurels. But you know what? I had a good feeling about Touhou Luna Nights. Now that I’ve played the demo to its conclusion, let’s see if I was right to be enthusiastic.

Story

I don’t know how much I should expect from fangame stories after playing the woefully contrived Remyadry last month. What we have here isn’t really any less contrived. Remilia transports Sakuya to an alternate world for the giggles. Sakuya’s powers have been stripped from her and she’ll need to roam this land in order to get her powers back and complete Remilia’s challenge. A short cutscene at the start hints towards there being some deeper meaning to all this, but I’m not holding my breath or anything.

Gameplay

The Boss Fight

Now, before I get into the finer details about the gameplay, I should get out of the way that Touhou Luna Nights doesn’t feel like a Touhou game. Furi feels like it could have been reskinned as a Touhou game. In Touhou Luna Nights, the only boss fight with Meiling gets demolished by simply freezing time and wailing on her.

Difficulty

My problems with Meiling’s fight points to a larger issue with the game in that it’s just too easy as a whole. Most enemies die in 2-3 volleys of knives. Most of them can’t do anything to you if you’re standing on a platform above them. And absolutely nothing in the game has an answer to your time stop ability. Also, the auto-aim knives? Come on, at least give the enemies a chance.

By the way, if you just barely scrape by an enemy or enemy projectile without being hit, then you’ll get a graze bonus. This heals hp, mp, and time when you do so. The problem is that enemies respawn every time you enter a room. So if you’re low on anything, just graze an enemy, leave the room, re-enter, repeat. It means that I don’t feel punished for getting hit unlike in something like Wizard of Legend. I would have loved if I was low on health and crawling my way to a vending machine to get a heal before I get my eyes gouged out by those stupid cats.

Puzzles and Environment

The puzzles for the first stage are quite clever and take advantage of the whole time stop mechanic well enough. Water solidifies when frozen in time, you can squeeze through gates by stopping time, etc. Other physical abilities like a glide and a sliding dash give you access to new rooms just like other Metroidvania games. I hope they have plans to make it far more complex later on but I like what I see here.

Also, I want to give some attention to the game mechanic where if you drink from a vending machine and get the empty can into the trash bin, then you get 10 gold. It’s completely worthless to gameplay but I like the message. It’s a good touch.

Sound

The background music for the demo is a remixed version of Sakuya’s theme from Touhou 6: ESoD, Lunar Clock ~ Luna Dial. The remix sounds more mellow compared to the original due to the languid accompaniment by an electric guitar and some synthetic noise. It’s not bit crushed or anything, but it still has an appropriately retro feeling for a Metroidvania game. The boss fight with Meiling also has a remixed version of “Shanghai Teahouse ~ Chinese Tea”. It claims to be the song “Shanghai in 1884”, but I’m not buying it.

Grazing enemies and fully restoring your mp makes this weird robot voice pop up. It’s a little incongruous with the rest of the game, but I’ll let it slide. Besides that, the rest of the sound effects are very understated. You can hardly hear the cat’s meow or the tanuki’s flail. Overall, nothing sounds too out of place. I kind of wish there was some jump sound effect but it’s not a big deal.

Visuals

Touhou Luna Nights proudly touts a meticulously-designed pixel art aesthetic and for the most part, I think it deserves it. There are some parts I’m not too keen on. Firstly, Sakuya’s run animation looks quite strange when you really put it under a microscope. Secondly, when did Sakuya decide to douse all of her knives in nitroglycerin? Cuz they all violently explode fire and confetti for no reason. I get that it makes killing enemies cathartic. The problem is that it obscures the fight. It also makes it impossible to tell a dead enemy from a living one behind the dust and fire.

Conclusion

For an early access demo, Touhou Luna Nights shows incredible promise. There is a lot of creativity on display here and the core gameplay is very satisfying. The biggest issue really comes down to a matter of difficulty. The fight with Meiling was very disappointing because it’s over just as soon as it starts. The flavor behind it isn’t even bad. She uses a mixture of martial arts attacks with colorful projectiles. It’s just that everything is pathetically predictable.

I have other things I could complain about, but none of them really spoil the experience. It’s in early access and will drastically change over time. So the biggest recommendations I can give to them is:

• Either include several difficulties so that psychotic players can abuse themselves, or just make the bosses slightly more effectual.
• Prevent the player from abusing the room transition grazing.
• Slightly reduce the particle effects that spew out of dead enemies.

Touhou Luna Nights is currently good. These changes will make it spectacular. If you want to support Team Ladybug with this project, you can buy the early access demo of the game on Steam.

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