Attempting to seriously rate/review every single game I've played - Day 1:
I rolled the dice and got Yoku's Island Express, a game which I played to 100% completion not too long ago, so thankfully my thoughts on this game are still relatively fresh in my mind.

This is a charming little indie pinball game with Metroidvania elements, or a Metroidvania with pinball elements if you prefer. It looks great, sounds great, and rarely falls into the trap that many pinball games do of getting you to do the same ludicrously precise shot over and over again. You might expect the pinball to get in the way of the exploration but I found that it wasn't usually an issue, and the map is small enough that even the lack of a more robust fast travel system isn't a huge problem.

There are some spots where the game can feel a little unpolished, mostly just strange stuff on the map screen and a couple of weird physics interactions, but otherwise this doesn't feel like an indie game at all.

It's not particularly long, only taking me around 10 hours to see everything in it, but it's worth the price and an easy recommendation from me.

I was worried going into this game that I wouldn't like it coming off of Imperishable Night and hoo boy was I right. To be clear right off the bat, this is a good game. The soundtrack is great as always, the writing is charming, the backgrounds look great, and overall this is still a quality package. If you played this as your first Touhou game I can absolutely see why you would like it, but for me, I'm too spoiled by earlier games.

Too many features are missing compared to IN. I get that this was made in a new engine so ZUN is pretty much starting from scratch here, but the fact that we're starting from scratch in the gameplay department really sucks. I wasn't optimistic about spell practice being in any game after IN but I'm still disappointed to see it missing. The playable roster has been reduced down to just Reimu and Marisa, albiet with three shot types each compared to the previous norm of two, but focused shots have returned to EoSD style as opposed to in PCB where focused shots behaved differently. You can no longer choose your starting lives which just feels like a bizarre choice to me, since the games were challenging enough as they were, and you got a score penalty for using more than 3 anyway, so I don't really see why we needed to remove the feature? Continues start the stage over which I think is fine but again I can't help but feel like I'm getting nerfed by it. Bombs are tied to power which is a fine idea in concept but it's just not that fun in execution since bombs should make the game easier, and lowering your power by using one just doesn't feel like a worthwhile tradeoff when simply dying gives you back almost all of your power. Grazing is gone for some reason, the particle effect is still there but it doesn't seem to have any actual purpose.

There are almost certainly even more things I forgot to mention but this is just a death by ten thousand paper cuts, none of these changes would be too bad on their own and if you haven't played an earlier game then you wouldn't even notice them, but to have them all piled on at once like this it just makes this game feel like a downgrade. I'm open to returning to this game in the future but for the time being I'd rather just move on.

Definitely the most beginner friendly of the first few Windows Touhou games. I'd 100% recommend this as a starting point for new players. Most patterns are on the slow and dense side which both makes them a lot more about figuring out how to dodge them rather than split-second reaction time, and forces new players to get used to the small hitboxes. There are several spell cards which feel designed to showcase certain elements that players should make use of, like Mystia limiting your visibility and necessitating the use of the enemy marker, or how Reisen forces you to adapt to predicting bullet movements. The spell card practice mode is very welcome and as someone who has sunk hours into just the Hall of Gods from Hollow Knight it feels like it's there specifically to target me. It's a small thing but the music not restarting between attempts also makes practicing a lot more enjoyable. This game also has the most beginner friendly progression system, since you can continue and still get a good-ish ending, even if the true endings are still locked behind 1CCing. As far as pure quality this game also offers a great soundtrack, some of the most creative and cool bullet patterns in the series up to this point, and a surprising amount of challenging unlockable content for completionists.

I can appreciate that this was ZUN's first game, developed entirely in his free time, but man this game sucks. Playing this feels like the prototype for a concept you'd make before realizing that the concept isn't fun. The Ying-yang orb probably killed me at least 5 times more than any bullets did. The game is also a bit of an eyesore, there's a copious amount of dithering on almost everything, which I suspect is from bit-crushing images with higher color depth? Either way it doesn't look good. The only saving grace of this game is having unlimited continues and no content being locked behind 1CCing it besides the ending cutscene (though why you'd want to play more of this I have no idea). If you're getting into Touhou and want to see where the series started, just play like 5 minutes of this or watch a playthrough before skipping to Story of Eastern Wonderland.