Shining Shattering Sky ~ Reverie of Breaking Unreality Enters Alpha Testing

About

Drillimation Systems, the studio perhaps best known for games such as the Chuhou Joutai trilogy, Touhou Project NES Demakes, and Mythos of Phantasmagoria, formally announces that their next project, Shining Shattering Sky ~ Reverie of Breaking Unreality, has entered alpha testing, allowing players to provide their feedback and improve the game.

Shining Shattering Sky ~ Reverie of Breaking Unreality is a block breaker danmaku puzzle game set 20 years before the events of the first Chuhou Joutai game. Players assume the role of Tomohiro Uchida and Hikari Aogami, the parents of Chuhou Joutai character Kumiko Uchida, who apparently find themselves in a new world while dreaming. In order to survive in this dream world, they are given the power of the Yin-Yang Orb to defend themselves from malicious forces.

Key features include:

• Local multiplayer with drop-in drop-out co-op play
• Varying backgrounds that change every 10 stages
• An original score by Susumu Takajima – best known for his work on Chuhou Joutai and Mythos of Phantasmagoria
• 100-stage story mode (when the game is complete)
• Stage editor for players to create their own stages

Background

This game is intended to be a spiritual successor to their NES Demakes adaptation of Touhou 1: The Highly Responsive to Prayers, which happens to be Drillimation’s most popular game. Originally, the game was going to be titled White Javelin and began development around the same time the second Chuhou Joutai game started production in late 2020. It did not get past the prototyping phase and was shelved while the rest of the Chuhou Joutai trilogy and Touhou Project NES Demakes were being worked on.

Nearly four and a half years later, Drillimation decided to revive the project but under a new name and a new set of characters. Before pre-production on the game began in the spring earlier this year, Drillimation Systems was going through a difficult time. After their previous game, Touhou Chouhatsuyou ~ Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity bombed critically, Drillimation had multiple choices, including designing another Touhou Project fangame that would improve upon that game’s flaws, a remake of the first Chuhou Joutai game, or a spiritual successor to their most popular game. They overwhelmingly chose the lattermost.

Before Touhou 1: The Highly Responsive to Prayers NES Demake was developed and released, the company never had plans to produce Touhou Project fangames in the long term, but they would only persevere with the idea following that game’s success. They went on to produce adaptations of all of the original generation (or PC-98) Touhou Project games, before they went on to produce original fangames, including the Mythos of Phantasmagoria duology and the standalone games Touhou Meijinka ~ Song of Divine Tempest and Touhou Chouhatsuyou ~ Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity. Shining Shattering Sky ~ Reverie of Breaking Unreality is the studio’s first original game since the first Chuhou Joutai by not incorporating any pre-existing intellectual property.

About Drillimation Systems

Founded by Susumu Takajima in 2014, Drillimation Systems is the author of the Drillimation Danmaku Universe. The universe began with the release of the demo for the original Chuhou Joutai in 2019 and following the success of an NES-inspired adaptation of the first Touhou Project game The Highly Responsive to Prayers, Drillimation has since expanded the universe by releasing twelve titles over the span of five years.

Download

The link to the alpha can be found here.