One thing I’ve learned with there being so many games out there to suit different genre and even style tastes, is that there are going to be games tied to more niche properties you simply don’t know anything about. While I’ve played a few Touhou games, and can appreciate their pretty typically cute-ish anime art style, I’m otherwise completely ignorant of it. So if you’re a Touhou fan looking for a perspective on how well it lines up with its brethren and source material, I’m not going to be able to provide that. Instead, I’m here to give the rundown for the average folks like me just looking for the best games out there, and who don’t necessarily see any plus or minus to what properties they may be tied to.

While it’s an enormously cheery and upbeat title, outside of some off characters who seem to be quite worked up over something or another, it’s absolutely an odd mix. During the day you’ll wander about town, talking to people, finding recipes, and collecting ingredients to use at your food stand, then at night you’ll work to use those ingredients to put together a variety of delicious dishes and refreshing drinks in a pretty typical time management restaurant sort of style. Oddly enough, there’s also a jukebox that will allow you to play some pretty varied, and sometimes difficult, music rhythm games as well just because they felt like including it I suppose. There’s some story to work through, characters to chat up and befriend, eventually a wider variety of drinks and dishes to whip up, and it’s all pretty light and relatively low effort.

The thing is, depending on what you’re looking for, this could be a disappointment. If you were really looking to challenge yourself with the time management piece, between your helper and the fact that pretty well every dish is very simple to prepare, that aspect isn’t likely to keep your interest for long. Strangely, I’d say the rhythm game has the opposite problem, featuring nice enough tracks but then very quickly swinging from overly easy to quite challenging without a whole lot in between, so it’s more of a novelty than anything. The problem is that there are quite a number of sims out there, most of them being cheaper to boot, that handle all of this in a more engaging and consistently challenging way, making this an odd bird in many ways. 

I really think familiarity with the Touhou brand and its characters would be essential to getting anywhere near enough out of the game, especially at this price point. Seeing it as part of a universe you already know and appreciate gives it a leg up on pretty well anything else since it can draw you further into that world and its stories, but unfortunately without that connection it becomes all the more easy to see its shortcomings as a time management sim. If you happen to be a fan, I’d still give it a long look and perhaps wait for a sale, but if the Touhou name means nothing to you, I can’t see a compelling case to get invested in it since it has peers that handle gameplay more effectively.