Touhou Lensed Night Sky, Kaseigai Review – A Roguelite Rebirth

Welcome to another look at the shifting, shimmering sands of the indie scene where a thousand developers scream for your attention, but only a few have the gall to look you in the eye and offer something truly transformative. Today, we turn our gaze toward a project that dares to ask this question: what if the bullet-strewn elegance of the Touhou Project franchise was forced to undergo a rigorous, roguelike metamorphosis? I am talking, of course, about Touhou Lensed Night Sky, Kaseigai, a game that doesn’t just want you to dodge projectiles; it wants you to buy, sell, and trade your way through a chaotic curriculum of modular destruction. It is a game of rock-hard abs, a banger soundtrack, and a visibility crisis so profound that it makes London fog look more like a clear summer morning. So, let us step beyond the barrier, leave our sanity at the show counter, and see if this roguelike rebirth is a divine scension or just a beautifully pixelated mess.

Gameplay

What happens if you take the bullet-strewn and pattern-heavy gameplay of a Touhou Project game and shove it into a blender with a roguelike? It’s like putting hot sauce on a milkshake. That won’t work, and you’ll be sweating like a pig in a slaughterhouse trying to make it to the final stage.

The gameplay is a chaotic curriculum of modular destruction. You don’t just dodge danmaku, you’re managing a shop like some kind of supernatural accountant. You can sell your own shotypes and trade away your bombs, and even turn your character into a mere starter for a wacky loadout that either makes you a god or a complete mess. It’s like building a house out of toothpicks while someone throws hammers at your head.

And the difficulty? Easy mode in this game feels like Hard in anything else. They give you a health bar and healing items. Sure, they use that as an excuse to fill the screen with more danmaku than a broken popcorn machine. It’s a mess of colors and pixels where the backgrounds, bullets, and own attacks blend into one giant, disorienting soup. I’ve seen clearer images in a bowl of alphabet cereal.

You’ve got macro-doding, persistent unlocks, and enough items to crash a mainframe, but you can’t even remap the controls mid-run? I have to use the X button to shoot on an Xbox controller? Who decided that? It’s like trying to play a piano with boxing gloves. It’s addictive but frustrating, and it makes me want to barf. I’d rather eat danmaku than deal with that final stage visibility again, but I probably won’t because I have to go back for one more run. I’m a glutton for punishment.

Graphics

What were they thinking with the graphics!? You look at the character portraits and everyone is so expressive and bouncy that it feels like they’re caffeinated beyond belief. They gave Reimu rock-hard six-pack abs. Since when does a shrine maiden spend her time doing a thousand crunches a day between exorcisms!? It’s absurd – some people call the art derpy, but I call it a fever dream in a pixel factory.

And don’t even get me started on the visibility – this game is a mess of colors and pixels. It’s like someone threw a bucket of neon paint into a leaf blower and pointed it directly at your eyeballs. The backgrounds, danmaku, and your own attacks all blend together into one giant, disorienting soup. I’ve seen clearer images in a bowl of alphabet cereal, and trying to find a tiny item drop in the middle of this chaos is trying to find a pair of contact lenses in a pite of glitter during a hurricane.

The items are so minimalist you can barely see them, and the enemy radar at the bottom uses these tiny little sprites that are supposed to be helpful, but you’re too busy having a seizure from the background animations to even notice. They added drop shadows to the bullets to help you see them, but it’s like putting a wet floor sign in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean – it’s a nice gesture, but you’re still drowning in a sea of projectiles.

It’s got that retro aesthetic, which is just a fancy way of saying I can count the pixels on my fingers. The title screen animations are charming, but once the game starts, it’s a non-stop assault on your optic nerves. I’d rather stare at a broken television set for three hours than try to parse what’s happening on the final stage again. It’s a beautifully written love letter to Touhou Project, but the handwriting is so messy that I need a magnifying glass and a bottle of aspirin just to read it.

Audio

Usually, in a Touhou Project game, you expect the music to be good, but this is a total banger. It’s like ZUN and a heavy metal band had a baby, and that baby grew up to be a rock star! The soundtrack is so good it makes you want to headbang while you’re getting annihilated by a purple wall of death!

The music is amazing and stellar – I’m talking everything from soft, jazzy tracks that make you feel like you’re in a high-end lounge to hard rock and electronic beats that make your ears bleed in the best way possible. One player said they’d buy the soundtrack on vinyl! For a game where you play as a shrine maiden with abs, the stage 5 boss and final boss themes are so fantastic that they almost make you forget you’re about to lose your last life to a stray pixel!

But then you get to the sound effects. The music is screaming at you like a banshee, but the actual gameplay sounds are like a wet noodle hitting a sponge. The grazing sound, which is the most important in a Touhou Project game, is so quiet you can barely hear it in the middle of a stage. It’s like trying to hear a mouse fart in the middle of a hurricane. They need to make the sound effects punchier. I want to hear the bullet scraping past my hitbox, not guess if I’m still alive based on whether the game over screen has popped up yet. It’s a captivating presentation, but when the music is a 10 and the sound effects are a 2, it’s like eating a gourmet steak with a plastic spork.

Other

What else is there to say about this game? You’ve got a story that’s actually captivating and very interesting with different endings for every single character on every single stage. It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, but instead of turning pages, you’re turning into a pile of ash because some annoying as heck bunnies decided to teach themselves how to shoot guns.

The writing is full of that modern tint of humor. You know, that kind that makes you chuckle while you’re questioning your life choices. And they’ve got characters like Yumemi Okazaki and Chiyuri Kitashirakawa showing up like sketchy outsiders while Reimu looks like she wants to punch a hole through the screen! It’s got charm, personality, and it’s clearly a work of love from a bunch of absolute madmen.

But then you have the technical side with optimization issues and slowdown. Performance issues that some players call intended and based, but I call a reason to buy a new graphics card. It can make your computer lag pretty badly, especially on the final stage where the game is trying to calculate ten billion things at once. I even heard about someone drinking a Hourai Elixir in the shop and outliving the entire universe just because the game couldn’t figure out how to kill them!

It’s in Early Access, so yeah, there are bugs. I’ve heard of people losing runs to crashes or having their web browsers randomly opened by an item. Imagine you’re one hit away from victory and suddenly your computer is trying to sell you car insurance.

Overall, Touhou Lensed Night Sky, Kaseigai is a beautifully pixelated mess that I can’t stop playing. It’s hard, disorienting, and it’s got muscular shrine maidens. It’s absolute madness. I’m going back in for one more run and if I see another bouncing bullet, I’m gonna lose it.

Bad Qualities

I love this game, but it’s got more issues than a stack of comic books in a typhoon. Here are some things that make me want to throw my controller into the sun.

• The visibility can be a total nightmare. Between the busy backgrounds, neon danmaku, and your own chaotic attacks, the game becomes a disorienting soup of colors and pixels.
• Don’t let the names of the difficulty levels fool you. Even on easy, your healthbar will give the enemies an excuse to throw five times as much danmaku at you. It’s like being told you’re going for a light jog and then getting chased by a pack of wolves.
• The optimization is a joke. When the screen fills with danmaku, which happens regularly, the game will slow down and lag like an old PC trying to run a modern blockbuster.
• The sound effects are not nearly as good as the music, such as the grazing sound being near-silent as explained above.
• You can’t remap the controls halfway through a game. If you realize your thumbs are cramping because of the weird default layout, you’re just out of luck.
• I’ve already explained that item that opens up your web browser in the middle of a fight. Imagine being one hit away from total victory…

My Verdict

This game is a total paradox and a hidden gem and a Must Have on the scale. Based on the information above, I give it a 7.5 out of 10. The soundtrack is a masterpiece, the gameplay is addictive as heck, and it’s got more heart than a room full of Hallmark cards. But then you’ve got visibility issues that turn the screen into a bowl of neon vomit and a difficulty curve that feels like climbing a mountain made of greased glass. It’s a work of love from a bunch of absolute madmen and I can’t hate it, even if it makes me scream until my lungs turn inside out. It’s better than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for sure. I’m going back in for one more run.

To compare how it would rank on the different parts of the scale:

Rank	Reason
Must Have	The soundtrack and gameplay both fit this category. You’ll be coming back again and again, along with listening to the soundtrack.
Debatably Good	The visibility issues and difficulty curve can make the game difficult.

Anyway, why did I have to review this game? Because the devs made me. I ended up reversing course for my original review after I treated it like the pilot episode of The Angry Video Game Nerd where you write a negative review for an otherwise good game, and I wrote this entire review in the style of Rolfe’s voice.

If you want to check out the game, it is currently on Steam Early Access. My only complaint though is there isn’t a version on itch.io.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1825250/Touhou_Lensed_Night_Sky_Kaseigai/