Touhou: Lensed Night Sky (Early Access) | Sumireko Hard 1cc (Challenge +7)

Curses: Tunnel Vision, Anemia, Frenetic Rush, Mortality, Haunting (+15)
Wards: Preparation, Greedy Mike, Healthy (+8)
Final Challenge Value: +7
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New Touhou roguelike bullet hell released in Early Access, and it's a banger! I've been playtesting it ever since 2022, and it's been a fantastic journey seeing this game build from the ground up.
Like Touhou 18 and 18.5, Lensed Night Sky has a mid-stage shop system and randomly-selected enemy waves. You buy and sell items through the shop, and can also sell your own stats for additional credits. Credits are not retained after a shop, so you're encouraged to pick and choose what to sell and buy carefully.
Combined with a limited inventory, the roguelike shop system here is quite delicately-balanced and provides more strategy then Risk of Rain-flavoured "buy and pick up every item possible and break the game" (though there are still definitely ways to break this game with some luck!)
The game's boss and stage formations/patterns are decent and have plenty of creativity, though compared to other non-roguelike shmups I've played they're not as tightly designed - which, when you consider how roguelike mechanics come into play, is understandable. It is very much designed around you using the shop liberally every chance you get - and I appreciate that direction! Every good game should give players a reason, if not many to engage with its core mechanics.
There are various "curses" and "wards" you can take which are additional game modifiers - they can do things such as "add a bunch of vengeful spirits to your inventory that you must pay to get rid of" (Haunting curse) or "start with maxed out stats" (Preparation ward). Curses add challenge value, while Wards reduce them. I played with a mix here which put my final value at 7. There are achievements for clearing the game with high challenge values, up to 30!
Lensed Night Sky, being in Early Access, is still incomplete - the final stages and "epilogue" chapters are still not implemented, and there's still many bugfixes and balancing changes to be done. I'd love to see some performance and visibility fixes in particular, as you can see some of the lategame patterns can tax my laptop a lot with their thousand bullet counts.
For what it is, though, Lensed Night Sky is incredibly promising! I encourage giving it a try.
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Try Lensed Night Sky here!
store.steampowered.com/app/18...