Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity is an action rpg based round the incredibly popular characters of the Touhou Project. The title was developed by a small Japanese dev team, a dev team that is 3 people small. This is one of the multitude of fan made media that has been inspired by Touhou. Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity started as an incredibly popular PC game, was picked up by XSEED games, and is now coming to North America on the PlayStation 4. The PlayStation 4 version is 1080p and runs 60 FPS. The game follows the vampire Remilia Scarlet, going after a monster who destroyed her mansion.
The game allows the player to play as either Remilia Scarlet or her maid Sakuya Izayoi. They differ in coat styles with Remilia being more focused on magical, vampire based attacks and Sakuya using time control and knives are her weapons of choice. The demo version of the game gave the player the option to play as either character. Each character has their own storyline which plays out differently but take place in the same level, the only major difference in the level design here is that Remilia has all her stages take place at night because she is a vampire. The player must navigate their way through areas containing different enemies, sort of like mini dungeons, to progress through the level. The player has the ability to level up and improve their abilities. They have a variety of abilities assigned to a specific button on the controller and can switch them out in the options menu. Each attack has a different range, amount of damage that it deals as well as how much energy it consumes. Some enemies even attack in bullet hell style sprays which is a nice nod to Touhou’s origins. Boss fights also revolve around bullet hell style attack patterns, thought the patterns in this game are nowhere near as difficult as the ones in the strictly bullet hell Touhou games. This does not imply that the boss fights are easy.
An important factor for a lot of Touhou games is the music. Fans of the games have created probably thousands of covers or original compositions of a similar style. Scarlet Curiosity does not disappoint in the department of music, the music being the only aspect of the game which was not created by the dev team is beautifully instrumented. As far as aesthetics are concerned the game has very vibrant and colorful scenery, and even though the only change between the levels for the two protagonists is day and night, the developers present the same levels in a way that if the player were to play through both story lines the levels would not seem repetitive.
The game is set to be released sometime in the Summer this year. After speaking to one of the representatives for the game at the booth, they told me that the game was still going through localization, translation and bug testing before its official North American release date can be announced.