ESCAPE FROM TOUHOU Steam Demo Review
Verdict: Play
A top-down extraction shooter starring three Touhou girls with modern rifles, ridiculous on paper and a proper loop unde
Escape From Touhou. I was scanning a week's backlog of demos, picked about twelve, and this one stood out because it looked random. A squad of three small anime girls, top-down, extraction Shooter. Nothing about that pitch made sense to me. I opened the first crate expecting a magic staff and got handed an M4A1. That is the game.
Play. Escape From Touhou is the most random Steam pitch I have picked up in weeks. It hooks in about ten minutes on the loop alone, and the anime-witches framing that pulled me in has largely faded by then. The three-character squad is fun to switch through. The hunger and thirst pressure does more than I expected, and pushes each deployment past a straight shooting gallery. Grenades became the answer to most fights I was about to lose. The extract-or-greed decision is tight. The onboarding is thin, the map wants work, and I lost a whole run to a stash rule the game did not teach me. Two hours in I had cleared the early contracts, the harder zones and vehicles were still locked, and I ran out of time. I would go back to it. If the full release fixes the map, teaches the stash rule and opens up the deeper zones, this is going to be worth watching.
Do not apply: Early Access.
Dropped Steam tags: Roguelike (author call , maps randomise, but the core loop is not roguelike-shaped), Loot Shooter, Exploration (not on site approved list).
Pros
- The three-girl switch-fire squad plays properly well once you internalise the 1, 2, 3 rhythm
- Randomised map spawns and difficulty zones keep each deployment worth reading before you commit
- The extract-or-push-on decision is doing real work every run
Cons
- No tutorial and the key-mapping screen does not show you the default controls
- A crate at base is easy to mistake for the stash, and anything left in the wrong one disappears with your next run
- The map is functional but hard to read at pace
Setup and premise
I knew nothing about Touhou going in. It is a big Japanese series by Team Shanghai Alice with a serious fan following. This game is a fan-made spin-off built on that world. Reimu, Marisa and Nitori are three of the main girls from the source material, where they fight with magic. Here their dimensional transporter has broken, they have crash-landed in a red desert, and their magic is gone.
You command all three as a squad. Number keys 1, 2 and 3 switch between them. Whichever girl you are not controlling flanks in a little triangle and auto-fires at whatever you are shooting. The characters are surprised by the guns, and I was too. Ten minutes in I had forgotten how ridiculous it all was and was just playing. The loop would still work if they were skinned as normal army people. The trailer sells you the absurdity, and after that the mechanics carry it.
Controls and Survival layer
There is no tutorial. The key mapping menu does not even show you the default controls. I sat through the intro cutscene, walked out into the first zone, and worked out the basics by pressing everything. Pistol, crate open, bandage craft, switch keys. It was fine once I had it.
A good chunk of the way in I noticed the hunger and thirst bars. Both had been draining while I was faffing with loot, and both can kill you. Every deployment has a Survival layer where those two bars press on you alongside your ammo and your wounded squad. At one point I drank contaminated water on the game's 34% chance of losing health, because the alternative was dying of thirst. Two inventory slots on food and water became non-negotiable pretty quickly. That pressure is a good thing. It stops the deployment being just a shooting gallery.
Combat and the extraction loop
The Action holds up better than I expected from the top-down camera. You aim with the mouse and press 1, 2 or 3 to jump to whichever girl has the best line. Whoever you leave behind keeps firing at what you were shooting. Grenades did a lot of my work once I worked out you have to hold the throw button to charge them. I had been tapping them and getting terrible tosses. Once I held it, a lot of my worst pileups cleared in one throw.
Later the squad started to feel less samey. Marisa does more damage with rifles and Nitori is better with sub-machine guns. Once I could afford proper weapons, the squad-switch mattered. I was picking the right girl for the range, not just moving between three copies of the same pistol.
The core loop is a Shooter with an extraction gate at the end. You deploy, dig through buildings and corpses, watch the map for the extraction icon, and try to get back with your bag full. Deeper zones are darker on the difficulty overlay and hold better loot. My best find was a luxury watch worth 1,800 dollars. I died on the way out before I got it home to sell. The map took me a while to read, but once I got it, my whole approach became handrailing along the edge and only dipping into red zones for a specific objective.
Base, progression and what stays locked
Only loot you put in the stash between runs sticks. I had been dumping mine in a crate near the stash, thinking that was the same thing. When the next run went badly, I lost the lot. Later I lost my backpack upgrades the same way, and that one hurt after I had saved up for them. The game does not warn you which crate is which. It should. Once I understood the split, everything after got easier.
Back at base you move around top-down between a shop, the stash, a mission board and a training menu. The training menu upgrades things like max health, hunger drain and thirst drain. The last two slow the bars down, and they are worth spending on early because the vanilla drain rate is aggressive. There are blueprints for better weapons I never had the materials for, and vehicles I could not buy yet. A pickup truck is level three, an SUV level six, a tank level eight.
Out on the map I did find a truck with a mounted machine gun you can hop in. It is a good shout when it works. The trucks are made of paper though, and if one blows up with the girls near it, the whole run is over. A separate warp-core level also gates the story missions and I could not work out how to raise it. Armour and helmets stack onto the girls invisibly, which is something I would have liked to see on the models. Two hours in I had done all the level-two contracts and there was still plenty I had not seen. I ran out of time, but I might go back.
Developer: FIVE DUCK GAMES
View on Steam
Tags: Action, Shooter, Survival, Indie
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