Touhou Library Survivors

Very good title! This one straddles the line between a true bullet hell and a Vampire Survivors inspired game. Some of the enemy bullet patterns get tough, and you are a 1-hit-wonder. You don't have the typical autofire on your own bullets too, as you're limited by Patche's stamina. You have several different starting shot types, one for each day of the week (fitting with Patchouli's title in the mainline Touhou games), with a few days having two choices. All other spells are in the pool and you can easily pick them up. If you start with a spell for today's day of week, you get a bonus to your damage. There are also rogue-lite style incremental upgrades, some of these are tiny but others are game changing upgrades. These Talents can be enabled or disabled as a whole when you start a run, there are achivements for doing the two highest difficulty options when using no talents. Enemies shoot bullets themselves, and as you increase in difficulty the bullet patterns get denser and more complex. There are also some stronger fairies that fire bullets, some of which can be really difficult if too many overlap at once. There are multiple difficulty levels, with Lunatic getting really intense if you haven't put together a strong enough build to control the foes while dealing with priority targets. The upgrade system is also pretty unique, you have a hexagonal grid, and each spell is 2 hexes, while passives, modifiers to spells, and upgrade catalysts all take up 1 hex. Positioning your spells, modifiers, passives, and upgrades in the hex grid is a key part of the gameplay. This title has partial controller support. I wish it had full, but it worked well enough on the Deck that it wasn't an issue. Moving around works fine with the stick and D-pad, RT fires your spells, and aiming is done with either the right stick or for me the Deck's touchpad. The Deck's touchpad worked really well, I would not have enjoyed the controller controls without that option (right stick mouse cursor movement sucks). Only some spells are aimed, it also directs what direction Patche's facing. The music is good but there's not much variety. You'll be hearing the same track over and over. There's also only one level background, so no variety there. The waves of enemies remain the same, only modified by difficulty, but the bosses can change. The level 1 midboss can be one of 3 possibilities. The final boss of hard mode can be [spoiler]Rumia EX if you play on the 7th of the month, replacing Marisa[/spoiler], and there's an extra boss and level after Marisa if you play on Lunatic. I'm still working on Extra, but I expect there will be an extra boss after the Lunatic boss too! The spritework is great though, Patchouli's animations are good, and the fairies and bosses all look great. The cutscene art is mostly line drawings but they look really cute too. The price was pretty inexpensive for the enjoyment I got out of this title. I still have a bit more to do, but after beating Lunatic I felt I needed to get a review written. Well recommended to Touhou fans, only recommended to Vampire Survivors fans if you wish to deal with the more complex bullet patterns you'll be faced with.