So I've beaten the demo now on Normal with Reimu/Tenshi-Red, Reimu/Tenshi-Green and Byakuren/Marisa-Green, and on Hard with Sanae/Futo-Green (tried Blue but found it too frustrating). I appreciate the effort and some of the unique ideas put into Treausre Castle Labyrinth, but I'm...not certain what to think of the game as a whole. It's got a lot of gameplay aspects that might not be objectively flawed but just don't appeal to me in particular. For this reason I wasn't sure for a while whether to post my feedback, but I love fangames, so in the interest of providing whatever I can that might help make this game the best it can be, I will do just that.
Let's start with the patterns. I found them overall to be decent, solid, but not terribly remarkable. The stages in particular weren't that exciting. The exception to all this is Seki; she's got a lot of nice thematic spells that I really enjoyed.
I have no complaints about the menus and overall package. It does what it's supposed to do. The fancy menu decorations and little animations when you're choosing a lamp color are neat. Wait, I do have one tiny complaint about the pause/game over menu: the menu choice is selected when you release the fire key, not when you press it. When I get a game over, I'm often still holding the fire key for a second or two and end up instinctively releasing it just in time to select "continue", which is a bit annoying if I wanted to select something else. I would recommend requiring the key to be in KEY_PUSH state to confirm the selection.
The visual style is pretty unique and I like it quite a bit. The animation when a boss appears is spectacular, and the stage 3 BG is very atmospheric and immersive. The character portraits are a little unusual, but they're not so bad to get used to. I do have a few of my world-famous nitpicks to hand out for the visuals, though:
-The player sprites definitely feel weird to me; I think it's that their motion isn't very fluid.
-The dark non-solid butterflies in San's final kind of blend into the background.
-A lot of the bombs' visual effects have a delay, with no really prominent effects going on, between when you activate the bomb and when the actual "bomb" part starts. Sometimes I go to press X and for a second I'm not sure if I actually bombed (this happens a lot with deathbombing).
-Those black regions on the HUD. I just...don't like those. I feel like if you have to obscure the HUD to make the text readable, it's too contrasty. I'd rather the HUD just be edited to make the text on it more readable. Or at least make the black areas look more like realistic cracks on a wall or something, because they look kind of messy as it is.
Music is good overall. I love the stage 3 theme, and the other two stage themes are great as well. I'm not quite as crazy about the boss themes but they're still pretty good. The sound effects are...very un-Touhou-like and they kind of bother me. Maybe I'm just not used to them, but they don't seem to have as much impact as the various SFX sets used in other fan and official Touhou games. Especially the initiating-a-bomb SFX, which also contributes to the problem I mentioned above; it's not noticeable enough.
I'm not familiar at all with the original TCL music album, so I don't know anything about what will happen in the full game, but the story seems interesting enough. Not overly exciting right from the start, but I'm still looking forward to seeing how it turns out.
Now...the system. Oh boy, the system. This will be the longest part and also the hardest to write. Let's get the positives out of the way. I like the complexity in mixing colors to get exactly the resources you want; it's a spectrum of possible resources instead of more black-and-white choices. Choosing a color at the start for a somewhat different gameplay style is a neat concept. Aside from those points, though, the system feels like an an amalgamation of everything I dislike about UFO and TD, which happen to have my two least favorite systems in all of the official games, with some additional annoyances stacked on top of them.
To get the color you want in Light Up, you have to really focus on going to the locations of the correct colored items, and I feel like this competes with the main objective of dodging bullets. It's not the same as, say, trying to collect as many autumn leaves during the Harvest as you can, or grazing and collecting items to extend Aspect Shifts. Those are things you can kind of just do at the same time as dodging, and if you miss a few items it's no big deal, you can keep doing the route you were doing. In TCL's case, though, trying to collect exactly the items you need feels almost like a second set of bullets to dodge on top of the actual bullets. The thing I disliked most about UFO was having to play this little UFO minigame (both collecting them and filling up the UFOs) at the same time as dodging like normal. I actually find it worse than UFO because in that game, at least you know what each type of UFO does. In this one, the small light items spawn in a predetermined color order, and they tend to end up bunched together, and you'll start sucking them in if you get close enough, and you have to dodge bullets at the same time as doing all of this. Between all of that, it feels like I don't have a lot of actual control over what resource I end up getting.
The TD-esque part of the system is that you have to kill specific stage enemies to get the orbs that activate Light Up. What I didn't like about TD's system was that you can only get resources when the game says you can, instead of getting resources by playing well (I had this problem with WBaWC as well), and you have to defeat exact, specific enemies that might be blocked off by bullets or other enemies, or else you can't get those resources. You may argue that the older official games only gave you bombs at predetermined points, and that's correct, but at least 1) it was usually easy to get them and 2) you still got extra lives by playing well. And this part of the system is also even worse for me than in TD, since, thanks to all those things I stated above, killing those specific enemies only gives you a chance at getting the resources you want instead of just getting them. This could theoretically be a game where you have to plan good routes in order to get the optimal amount of stuff, but it seems like collecting a single color item 2 seconds too late or failing to kill a single enemy because of bullet RNG will screw over your entire route.
TCL's resources are also extremely tight just like in TD, maybe even more so. No decision about what resource I'll go for ever feels like a good one. It takes an entire stage just to gain 1 of the resource that aligns with the color you chose (longer if your color is Blue since no resource is aligned with it), and if I do that I've totally neglected the other one. Or I could try to earn resources more evenly, but then I'm almost to San's fight before I accumulate a single extra life or bomb. And again, the resources I get are usually not exactly the ones I wanted. Also, you can't get them at all during boss battles. I just find that really lame.
So how would I suggest to the team that the system be changed? Well, that really depends on your intentions for the game. I can see how the system would appeal to people with different taste in systems. I might simply not be in the main audience you're aiming the game at, in which case I perfectly understand, and you don't need to listen to the random opinions I'm spewing everywhere. But maybe one or more of these thoughts (arranged from least to most effect on gameplay) I'll throw at the wall might give you an idea you like:
-Add some kind of diagram indicating your exact placement on the...uh...Light Up Color Matrix. I don't know exactly how many items I need to collect to switch to the next color.
-Have light items only be drawn to you if you're focused.
-Simply increase the amount of resources Light Up gives you or allow it to be activated more often.
-Add Light Up opportunities during boss fights or simply have bosses drop resource pieces.
-Instead of spawning in a predetermined color order, have the color/amount of light items be determined by the color/type of enemy. This would tend to create groups of like colors rather than a mishmash of every color, and make routing more consistent. For example, you could wait until a group of enemies has traveled to one side of the screen before defeating them, which spawns their color items away from enemies on the opposite side.
-Ditch the large light items and have Light Up be activated when you collect a certain amount of small light items. This would work best if you increased the number of small light items and/or had them disappear sooner.
So yeah, I'm sorry for complaining so much, but I'd like to conclude by saying I don't think TCL is a bad game. I did enjoy it to some extent. There could be (and are, based on other responses I've seen) people who enjoy this style of Touhou game way more than I do. I hope it's understood that I'm just saying how I felt. And regardless of whether or not you make any changes based on my suggestions, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens in the full version and wish everyone the best on the rest of development.
