Gensokyo Night Festival is a fan made spin off game of the popular Touhou franchise, made by developers Vaka Game Magazine and tea_basira (who has done other Touhou related media), it follows Ibuki Suika (the drunk oni girl of the franchise) as she looks for something to do 'cause she's bored, a surprisingly common motive for many characters in-universe. This game is in early access, released on Monday of this week, which means it might have many problems and glitches, and is used more as a playable demonstration of what they are developing. It's also only the first level of the game, all six will be released by spring of 2020. So far, it has nice combo/projectile oriented dodging based game-play. Specifically, the combo style fighting it offers. Like most 2D platformer games, moves are linked to an action, then to different directions. Gensokyo Night Festival's combos are based around immediate actions, with basic combos that are just mashing X, to finishers that do a bit more damage. Along with the projectiles that do damage from a long distance, or just taking care of weaker enemies that fire projectiles. In order to pull off finishers, like the uppercut and the downward fireball, it requires a directional change during the last attack, like holding up or down. this is further mixed up by the density system. There are two bars you can fill, one for density, one for sparseness, one makes you slower, but powers up your finishers, and the other makes you move faster, but dodges slower. Using these two can essentially give you two modes, one for slower movement and more damage potential, and one for speedy escapes from big attacks, or just running around. All of these give different options that aren't going to be situational, since they all relate to either dodging through projectiles, or damaging opponents. The movement is like water (ironic for an oni), pretty fast, flows into itself, and is WET. Basically put, you can jump, turn to mist and fly around for a bit, hit the ground and keep dashing on the ground, and it gives an indescribable WEEEEEE! effect, if that makes sense. This can come into play when fighting enemies, since projectiles do fire in distinct patterns you can easily dodge, along with the generous invincibility frames that come with. But, it's true value shines when you run around and explore new areas. You feel just like Suika's run animation, essentially. The wide moveset is where controls come into play, the game only explains controller buttons, and even the control settings are only for controllers, not keyboard. Although, it isn't too much of a hassle to find a controller to hook up and the fact that making specific directional movements are easier with a controller stick (although that is up to preference), more information for keyboards, instead of finding out what each action is linked to by pushing all the buttons, would make both ways to play much more viable. The layout when you discover each button is fine though, dodging is mapped to shift (the universal dodge oriented key for mainline and fan made Touhou games), and even has really fun free movement when you turn to mist, with full eight directional control. The buttons for map, camera (for those sneaky areas across a jump), and the heal are all well mapped too. But in the end, it's still in early Access, and I had to redo many parts of the game because the new screens tended to freeze Suika in place, with an eternal spinning that requires going back to the title screen. This is expected, as said before it's in early access and this is initial impressions, when V 1.0 releases it will be an even nicer, more polished release. An Early Access *8/10
Obligatory Score: Spinning Suika/10 *this score is for the everything shown in the Early Access section, a new review will be made for the full release in Spring 2020
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JamesHe aspires to be a game designer, let's just hope he gets there. He also happens to goes to DSA. Categories
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