Touhou Brawl

Normally, I don’t really do Steam reviews. Most, if not all the games I have played, I always had a tendency to enjoy, even with any faults I may have come across during gameplay, and wouldn’t warrant an entire review. Touhou Brawl is what ended up breaking this silence. Before playing, I initially was hyped for the game. The idea of a Touhou-themed action-roguelike à la The Binding of Issac seemed like a neat concept. And with multiplayer included, it seemed like a fun way to get friends alongside you and beat Touhou bosses. But as I bought and played the game, getting to the end of an entire run as Cirno, I realized this game was riddled with problems. One of the problems I had when I was playing through the game was how it didn’t really feel like a Touhou game. The locations felt fine, there were enough recognizable locations from the Touhou franchise that can give this game a pass, yet they made the locations not feel “alive” in a sense. They felt more like ever-repeated room layouts with different skins so they would count as separate locations. Additionally, aside from the playable characters / bosses, the only semblance of Touhou characters in terms of enemies were on…

Game is fun, really fun with friends BUT! It definitely has issues and needs work if the dev doesn't abandon this game and adds more content fixes sound issues and UI bugs it will be a pretty damn fun roguelike. As of right now for the price pretty fair.

In my first run, I got trapped after I rolled into a corner and clipped out of bounds. In my second run, the warp gate to the final boss/zone broke, giving me a loading screen but then booting me back to where I was standing. As neither scenario had any enemies around to kill me, I had to manually abort my run both times, forfeiting all the coins(which are required for metaprogression) I had obtained in the process. I also found that certain power-ups had been left entirely untranslated. Other power-ups have incomplete descriptions, and some don't seem to work at all. As for more personal gripes, the walls blinking out of existence when you get close to ensure you can see where your character is would be a nice QoL feature, but it happens CONSTANTLY and makes the game unpleasant to look at. Certain level assets are tossed around haphazardly with little regard for the actual layout of the levels, resulting in things like chests and shrines being half-buried in walls or boulders. There's also no local or offline multiplayer. You can set up a private room with bots, but that's as close as you're going to get.

its peak im def not getting paid to say this message (save me im in a basement of the devs) real review though, tad bit buggy

quite cute, a few bugs here and there. expected for a new game. im not familiar with other touhou games so take that as you wish

I've tested Touhou Brawl on 3 separate systems: my main rig (see attached PC specs) and on the Steam Deck & Steam Machine. There are some massive issues while playing on the Deck & Machine, but my main PC had almost no problems running this game. It's a fun dungeon arena bullet hell. I didn't really like the volleyball minigame because the controls are pretty bad in my opinion, just like the other Touhou Volleyball game from the same developer. Steam Deck & Steam Machine issues: - Menus that overlap where they shouldn't - Random loading screen crashes - Can't properly change settings: for example Music / SFX volume can only be turned down while using the d-pad, mainly because the game freaks out if you have KB+M and a controller connected at the same time apparently. Using the touchscreen on the Deck sometimes works as a workaround but not always. To be honest, I would've given Touhou Brawl an in-between rating but because it is much more playable on a decent rig, it barely gets a "Recommended" from me. After many bugfixes and maybe a sale of at least -30%, it's easier to recommend.