Reviews from

in the past


One Sakuya Izayoi fumo has been deposited into your account, thank you for your service.

This game has ascended past the status of "Touhou Fangame" by a mile and stands proudly as a fantastic Metroidvania, regardless of how well you know the series.

The pixel art in this game is just beautiful. It doesn't pop out at you, desperately wanting you to look all over it, but instead sits calmly in the background. When you actually stop to look at it, you realize just how nice it looks, how detailed it is and how it's so seamless that you forget the game is done using pixel art at all.

The enemies in this game are also incredibly memorable in both design and animation - the animation especially, everything flows so nicely. Even the enemies that are basic conceptually, like the Will-O-Wisps and Skeletons are given a great amount of character just through their behavior and attacks. A great amount of them are parts of Japanese folklore, while still giving respect to the Touhou side of things - namely in the many kinds of fairy enemies. Fittingly for the Scarlet Devil Mansion, it also has a few enemies of western origin, like Frankenstein, and the White Rabbit!

The game controls incredibly nicely. The player is given an exceptionally powerful kit consisting of skills, snail time, timestop, and graze, but they will often not know how to fully utilize until towards the end of the game. This is one of my favorite schools of design in gaming - giving the player full reign of the character's abilities and letting them figure it out over time. The graze mechanic from the Touhou shmups is integrated beautifully in particular here as a way of gaining energy back and being greatly rewarding while keeping the risk of the move in play. Sakuya (the character you play as)'s basic attack feels good to throw out, stalling in the air with diagonal knifes is super cool, and every skill card in the game has its own unique use. On this last playthrough I did over the course of maybe a week, in which I 100%'d the game on 1 HP mode, I found myself having multiple genuine uses of each skill card in the game... except Stun Knife. I have no idea what Stun Knife is actually useful for.

The bosses of this game attack in a fixed pattern, yet keep you very much on your toes, giving the player the satisfaction akin to climbing a mountain after beating them, like a Dark Souls boss. Each one is very different from each other and usually require you to think outside of your usual habits in order to beat. One of the bosses, Marisa, possesses one of this game's very few glaring flaws - her Master Spark attack is really poorly designed. It deals a ton of damage and it seems like there's no way to dodge it. I now know how to dodge, but I don't even understand why it works (some weird graze mechanic). Outside of that, fighting each one is a blast. My favorite is the final boss, which is very, very long, and you end up learning much more about how to graze and gain back energy along the way. It's really tough, but not enough to feel impossible, but it is enough to really make you grow from it.

The flaws I have with this game are very few. One is Marisa's Master Spark, as stated. Another is the fact that the last boss of the Extra Stage is a ridiculously huge difficulty spike compared to the rest of the game. It kinda makes sense, considering how Extra Stages in the actual games are, but it doesn't change the fact that it kicked my ass so badly I got demoralized and stopped playing for a while. Even now, doing it on 1 HP mode with all my game knowledge over time, the fight took me a full day to complete.

The game's most noticeable issue is its writing. The English translation here is really, really weak. Full of errors and awkward phrasing (and a couple of times going outside the textbox), it's immediately noticeable with the sign at the beginning that says "Attack with [Attack Button]." The story in this game is basic, but the bad writing definitely doesn't help things. Furthermore, as stated, this game has ascended past the status of Touhou fangame, meaning many people who know nothing about the series will inevitably play this. This means the bad translation will hurt further, because players will feel left out in a way, since they'll feel like the reason they don't understand the dialogue is because they don't know the characters, when that isn't necessarily the case. I almost wish the game had a "I Don't Know Touhou" mode which would give you a brief rundown of who you are and who the characters you meet are. You could fit most of that info on a flashcard, so it wouldn't be anything too text-heavy either.

I don't know what the game's original writing looked like, so I can't say if it's also bad in the Japanese version, but it really does come off as a bad translation. It's definitely enough to knock it half a star, but I don't want to blame it for something that is solely an issue on localization's end, not the actual game's fault.

All in all in all... a super good game! It isn't particularly long, but it is VERY replayable. Super recommend for anyone into anything metroidvania or even just platforming related!

Art, vibes, and gay people are 10/10, but I'm bad at metroidvanias.


Awesome in all senses, just kinda short.

I hate how the games spawns back the "monsters" when I enter a room and get out again

Scratched the Metroidvania itched I was craving. A lot of this game was lost on me since I'm not a Touhou bro but the gameplay was great. The boss design was really interesting with my only gripes being that attacked were always repeated in the same pattern and near the end most bosses had large windows to dodge and heal in a way that killed a lot of the tension.

Risk/reward getting close to enemies is one of the coolest mechanics. Oh yeah, also frickin stop time.

Being a touhou game may be scary for new players but putting that aside, this is a perfect fun and challenging experience

Metroidvania where the main gimmick is being able to stop time is such a cool and player empowering idea. A little on the short side but some of the most fun boss fights ive ever played in a video game.

You can stop time and throw knives and jump on the knives just like DIO. Everything about this game's music, pixel art, sound design, and gameplay is excellent. Team Ladybug makes good shit every time without fail.

there's this one time i walked under a chandelier. it fell on me, but i stopped time just before it hit me, so i walked under it, then jumped on top of it in midair, used it as a platform to shoot an enemy that was otherwise hard to reach. when i resumed time i had gone past the obstacle and the enemy died by knives, avoiding me the trouble of dealing w it ever again. this took like 2 seconds , enough time for me to realize that this game is really fucking badass.

its a lil short tho so 4/5 :(

I dont know what to say, this game is amazing. The narrative is meh but the gameplay is the best part of this, and also, I love it's aesthetics

good bosses. okay metroidvania

Spamma 1000 facas e destrua tudo

really fun and plays amazing but painfully short
some stuff with level design sucks but meh its alright
also the game and the animations look great but sakuyas walking animation looks like sf3 twelve idle animation

i really like seeing how much faster i am every time i start a boss rush up

bro it's Castlevania with Sakuya tf else would you want in your game

Da persona che ha iniziato ad interessarsi a Touhou seriamente da relativamente poco tempo rimango sempre stupito dalla qualità del lavoro della community, che sia nelle fanfic o in veri e propri giochi di tutto rispetto. Luna Nights è un metroidvania piuttosto corto ma denso di contenuto mai filler e, sopratutto, con un sistema di combattimento solidissimo capace di trasporre pienamente i bullet hell a cui si ispira nello stile dei metroidvania più classici. Questo specialmente nelle bossfight, con ottimi remix delle ost iconiche di ZUN e pattern che spingono sempre a fondo l'uso della meccanica unica di fermare il tempo, che non sembrerà mai uno strumento eccessivamente potente ma uno dei pochi metodi per sopravvivere e lanciare quel paio di coltelli in più per assicurarsi la vittoria.
La mezza stella dalla perfezione è perché fanculo l'extra stage, si salva perché Cirno è scema cogliona

This game is sick. I've never played an actual Touhou game before but this is a metroidvania with a timestop as the central mechanic and it does do the concept justice

rock solid in all of its mechanics, but it's a bit too short for me. still amazing work.


Genuinely super fun game. The gameplay is solid, the aesthetic is nice. There isn't much narrative but it really doesn't matter when it has that Touhou charm to it with the music, gameplay, and careful integration of the mainline Touhou mechanics into this game.

decent game, but a lot of the game's disparate parts don't really fit together. the metroidvania elements not relating to the bosses most of the time (not including the final boss of the base game) is a huge hinderance. getting keys and not abilities is largely uninteresting. most of the game is quite easy until the last area hits a huge difficulty curve, and most enemies become bullet sponges. the game has great music and wonderful visuals yet the story and characters are incoherent without a basic understanding of what touhou is. not a bad thing on the last bit being that the name of the game is touhou but it meant i wasn't attached to anything going on. additionally, the characters didn't have enough dialogue to feel like anything other than the tropes they likely fall into in the original touhou games