Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity

GameSpaceRalph Whitmore

9/10

If you enjoy a good Action RPG with some good boss battles, and good BGM, you’ll enjoy this game.

GameSpewMark Sammut

8/10

Graphically, Ankake Spa designed a quite pleasing game here. Taking place in 2D and 3D levels, the backgrounds are picturesque and add a lot of depth and awe to the proceedings. The dungeons themselves are nothing to write home about, with a lot of repeated assets, but I never found myself annoyed by their presence. The soundtrack is gorgeous at times too.

TheSixthAxisMiguel Moran

8/10

Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity grabbed me and never let go. It’s a fun game with great characters and combat, and it all comes together in a package that kept me glued to my PS4. It’s a shame that mainline Touhou games haven’t seen English localisations, but the series’ unique charm has been wonderfully captured by this game. Newcomers to the series will have a great time dipping their toes into the universe with this title, and existing fans have absolutely nothing to lose with it either.

Playstation LifestyleChandler Wood

8/10

Want a fresh take on the bullet hell genre of games? Read our Touhou Scarlet Curiosity review to find out more about a unique genre bending JRPG.

Video ChumsA.J. Maciejewski

7.6/10

As an already popular franchise in Japan, Touhou games are slowly coming to western shores. This second title is an action RPG set in a charming world so let's see if Gensokyo is a land worth visiting.

DualShockersAzario Lopez

7.5/10

Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity is a game that is definitely made for fans that already know what to expect from Touhou doujin games. With that said, the game allows Western fans to spend some quality time with two of the more popular characters, but offers little beyond that in terms of story. I ended up enjoying the game more after the first few hours and I hope that players new to the series stick through the simplistic beginning and discover what this game has to offer.

WCCFtechKai Tatsumoto

7.5/10

2016 has seen a recent surge in visibility for the Touhou franchise. Birthed from the mind of one Japanese man (ZUN) and spun into a multimedia empire, the Touhou series has been transformed into animation, music, and fan-developed games. As the third fan game to be announced for a North American release at E3 2016, Scarlet Curiosity is a rather curious attempt to draw attention to a series which has only recently been introduced to the series with the fourteenth mainline title released last year.

TechRaptorNicole Seraphita

7/10

Scarlet Curiosity is a good, if short, RPG-Brawler that makes decent use of the setting that ZUN has created for the Touhou series. However, repeated enemies, generic looking stages, and the inability to block attacks from the beginning are a bit grating and prevent the game from reaching its full potential.

Touhou is a franchise known chiefly for its genre-defining bullet-hell insanity. Team Shanghai Alice’s wholehearted embracement of fan-made games (“doujin” more accurately), though, has led to a bustling, open-ended franchise where creativity is bread and butter. Its characters have gone on to star in everything from unofficial anime to light novels, morphing stars of a niche genre into broader symbols for aspiring developers in Japan.

Capsule ComputersTravis Bruno

6/10

Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity combines bullet-hell style gameplay with action based combat and creates a unique feeling game with a simple story and a lack of polish that may satisfy diehard fans but leave others wanting a bit more.

COGConnectedThi Chao

56/100

While I’d like to think I’m well versed in the world of JRPGs, I’ll admit there are quite a few titles I’ve missed due to their Japan only release. The Touhou Project series is a series of Japanese bullet hell shooters developed by Team Shanghai Alice that began in 1996. While the one man team mostly had released games on Windows PC, what sets Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity apart from previous games is that it is one of the few games that made it to consoles. Also, it’s one of the few Touhou titles to get a Western release despite having started out as a fan made game.

DestructoidCJ Andriessen

2.5/10

There really isn’t anything positive I can say about this game, outside of a few choice spots of interesting art direction. The level design is dull, the platforming is simplistic, the graphics look a few generations old, the RPG elements are basic, the music is forgettable, the enemies are pushovers, the difficulty is turned all the way to easy – I’m honestly at a loss for words. I would like to think I have this amazing vocabulary to intelligently convey just how abominable Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity is, but the best I can come up with is just calling it bad. This is a bad, bad game.