Source Code For Touhou Kourinden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria Retrieved, Updates Resume

In a turn of events that feels like an extra life in a boss fight, Drillimation Systems announced that the source code for their 2024 game Touhou Kourinden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria has been successfully retrieved and reconstructed. This news comes nearly a year and a half after a devastating hard drive failure that threatened to end the game’s development cycle permanently, avoiding a no-win scenario.

Back in November 2024, Drillimation shared a somber update informing fans that a hard drive crash had wiped the game’s primary data. At the time, even professional recovery services couldn’t guarantee a fix, and it never happened due to Best Buy hiding something in fine print, and Drillimation had warned players that future patches were effectively impossible.

However, the Prophet didn’t give up. Leveraging the UndertaleModTool, a community-driven reverse engineering tool for GameMaker titles, Drillimation was able to pull the missing logic and assets from the compiled game files. He described the process as reconstructing things into a state that works, effectively bringing the project back from the digital grave.

With the source code back in hand, Drillimation wasted no time. Two major updates have already been deployed to celebrate the game’s return, which mostly consist of bug fixes and a notorious hardlock on Route 6. Several crash issues were also fixed, including one involving enemy spawns, the options menu, and battle entry sequences. Drillimation noted the latter was a technical debt issue as the game was still using deprecated “view_xview” and “view_yview” variables, which have now been updated to current GameMaker standards.

While the recovery is a massive win, Drillimation asks players to proceed with caution. Because the code was reconstructed rather than restored from a clean backup, not everything has been tested, and players are encouraged to report any stray bugs to the official Drillimation Bug Tracker on GitHub.

Touhou Kourinden ~ Mythos of Phantasmagoria is currently available for $6.00 on Steam and itch.io.