After about 36 hours in the game at time of writing, I think that Lensed Night Sky is one of the best Touhou fangames I've played. The game is full to bursting with stuff to unlock, and I'm constantly finding myself coming back for more runs, both because the game is fun and I want to see what other stuff I can work towards. There's tons of variety in how you choose to build your loadouts and it's absolutely possible to come up with absurdly broken builds, but at the same time you will still need to practice patterns and learn how to deal with attacks on your own, since you won't always have access to the broken stuff.
I want to give praise to the writing in the game with the caveat that you shouldn't expect everyone to act exactly like they do in the official games. While Reimu and Sumireko are fairly accurate to their official portrayals, Chiyuri and Yumemi will probably be the most divisive since their route follows up on the ending of Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream where Yumemi has been kicked out of the university she teaches at. Chiyuri is portrayed as a terminally-online dropout who basically only stops gaming to sleep and work at her part-time job. As a result, she's constantly cracking jokes and quoting internet memes at people who don't understand them. She also curses quite a bit, but this is pretty much limited to Chiyuri, since again, she plays a probably unhealthy amount of video games online. If your first exposure to the game is a character yelling "BNUUY" at Reisen, you might think that the plot is nonexistent, but outside of Chiyuri (and to a lesser extent Yumemi, who's willing to indulge her friend here and there) the writing mostly plays it serious.
Mind you, I haven't seen the entire story yet. There is a [i]ton[/i] of plot going on that you won't be aware of after finishing your first playthrough, and though I don't want to talk too much about the overarching story, it's surprisingly heartfelt and melancholic. It's rare for me to want to play shmups after the first run for the story, but LNS does a great job of giving you more and more to dig into. There is also an entire set of bad endings for each character depending on where your run ends, and they range from funny (Reimu loses to a random fairy and sends her to resolve the incident instead) to depressing (most of the bad endings in the back half of the game), but each one helps soften the loss rather than slapping you with a simple GAME OVER screen. Each time you clear the game, you also receive a token to unlock one of the bad endings in the archives, if you'd rather not intentionally lose the game dozens of times for each character.
As for the gameplay, the closest official game equivalent is Unconnected Marketeers, but instead of simply collecting money and spending it between stages, your stats and your items are your currency. You have three primary stats - Power, Spell, and Graze. Power simply affects your how strong your shot types are, and a higher number is better. Simple. Your Spell stat affects spellcards which work slightly differently in this game compared to the mainline series. Spells operate instead on a charge system, where they passively recharge over time instead of collecting spell stocks. The higher your Spell stat, the faster they recharge. Finally, Graze affects the size of your graze box, which allows you to move close to bullets for various bonuses like capturing spellcards and charging sidearms, a new type of item for this game.
Shopping in this game is usually offered multiple times per stage, where you are allowed to sell a 1.00 portion of your three stats for a single credit, as long as said sale does not put you below 1.00. However, you are (usually) not allowed to carry any credit between shops, so while it might be safer to keep your stats maxed out to make it through the stages easily, you're denying yourself potential upgrades down the line by doing so. Another important thing to note is that you can sell almost any item you own for the same price it was purchased for, so even if an item in a shop does not immediately benefit you, it can still be smart to pick it up as a valuable cash infusion down the line if a build-defining item should show up.
It's this constant balance of risk vs. reward that makes the overall gameplay so compelling. The difficulty is generally higher than the average Touhou game, at least on Normal, and so giving up a good item or temporarily selling off your stats is a very real risk that can come back to haunt you if you're not careful. However, when a risky gamble pays off, it's a lot of fun to see the results where you completely trivialize otherwise dangerous bullet patterns or defeat a boss so quickly they can't even get an attack off.
And the music! With the exception of the stage 4 theme that is a miss for me, personally, I love the soundtrack in this game. It's about a 60:40 ratio of Touhou arranges and original music, and overall it's really solid in both regards! My personal favourite original song is when you hear CHALICE drop in the story, and my favourite arranged song is a big ol' spoiler so I ain't putting it here.
All this praise being said, I do have a few complaints. The difficulty of the game tends to spike hard in certain spots, and although I personally don't mind the challenge, it might feel a little unfair while you're still learning the game. The stage 4 boss in particular has the spellcard Sanctum of the Moon which feels wildly overtuned on Normal, and her survival card is mostly safe until the final section where your positioning has to be extremely tight or you'll likely end up losing a good chunk of health repositioning into the safe spots.
The stage 6 boss is probably the most variable difficulty fight in the game since each character fights a different version. Reimu's fight is the most straightforward with the exception of the survival card, which, even knowing the gimmick, is extremely difficult to parse because the pattern itself is so visually busy with all the background effects. Thankfully, by that time I usually have a way to mitigate some of the hits with spellcards and sidearms, but it never feels particularly enjoyable to have to deal with that card legit. Chiyuri + Yumemi's version of the fight is slightly harder, and Sumireko's version often feels like you're completely at the mercy of RNG on whether or not the boss's gimmick decides to absolutely make your life miserable.
Despite these few gripes, they come from a place of love and I do think that there's a lot to love about this game. I've barely scratched the surface talking about all the cool stuff in this game because I genuinely want to preserve the joy of discovery for you if you decide to play it. A ton of love and effort clearly went into this game and even though I had some issues as mentioned above, overall I think it's worth your time and you owe it to yourself to give it a shot if you enjoy roguelikes, shootemups, or Touhou games.
