It's not a bad game, but the reviews here are one sided. It's hardly metroidvania. There's no equipment. The biggest downside is the time stop mechanic. It get's old. The game was more of a chore than addicting. The graphics are nice, it's well made, but it just isn't all that fun. If you're desperate for some old-school cross-and-whip action, there are better options, like "Bloodstained" and "Midnight Castle Succubus". Definitely play those first.

Very good pixel art and animations, awesome soundtrack, fun time stopping mechanics, but the game's way too short (3-5 hours, depending on if you grind gems/levels and comb the map for HP/MP upgrades) and way too easy. Metroidvania elements are barebones, you mostly just collect colored keys and go to the next area, of which there are 5. The third area boss is mildly challenging, but then you realize you can just spam thousand knives non-stop, alternating between time stop and realtime and you'll basically have infinite i-frames + graze (HP/MP absorption) and also deal a ton of damage. So I beat the final boss on my first try, both forms. The story is very basic and the translation is poor and riddled with typos and awkward wording.

There's another game by this developer (Krobon) on Steam called Pharaoh Rebirth+. It's much, much better. It doesn't have the Touhou name attached to it however, hence it being relatively obscure.

Cool graphic, decent music, fluent control, interesting gameplay.

However, the game blew it with far too easy boss fights.
Straight-forward attacks from the bosses, the player character has an extremely small hitbox, HP regeneration is super generous, etc.
It has no difficulty option either, so if you're looking for a challenge, this probably isn't for you.

I'm afraid I have to say it's no more than a fan game.


EDIT: And it has a terrible, terrible level design.
I have a lot to talk about it, but I'll keep it as short as possible because it's an indie game after all and I don't want to go too harsh.

Warp rooms are in the spots you don't ever need to go back(unless you're shopping a lot) so it's downright useless, unlike Symphony of the Night. Even if you're doing 100% run, you wouldn't need to use warp rooms either as long as you know where the secret rooms are.

And after obtaining some essential power-ups and key items, you have to backtrack a lot. Backtracking is OK in decent games, because good games minimize tediousness by placing shortcut for the way back or by making backtracking itself an enjoyable gameplay experience(by letting players to utilize newly earned power-ups to navigate faster and easier or whatever.) This game does none.

It's like, all their creativity went into the graphic and the soundtrack.

Good gameplay, bad exploration.
I massively enjoy exploring in metroidvanias, so this didn't hit me well.

I wanted to like this game. I really did. I love Touhou, and I love platformers, and this game's got tons of good reviews, so I thought I'd have a good time but I really didn't.
There are good parts, to be fair. The art is fantastic, and there are tons of nice stylistic choices like how the rain in the first area slows / stops so you can see the individual droplets. Some of the puzzles related to stopping / starting time are really interesting. It controls great for the most part too. The music is okay, but not good enough that I'd listen to it over the original music from EoSD. But that's about all the good I can say about this game.
The issues I have with this game fall into two fairly distinct categories: how it is as a game and how it is as a Touhou work.

How it is as a game
For starters, this isn't a metroidvania, regardless of what people say. If anything's preventing your progress, you'll find a key or upgrade that lets you continue in that same area. You don't need to backtrack to earlier areas at any time unless you want collectibles (which for the most part don't make a difference but I'll get to that later). That's probably a good thing, because the warp placement makes no sense at all, mostly placed on the edges of areas instead of being centralized for easy access.
Up until the third area, the game's fairly mediocre. You control great, but no enemies pose any challenges, so it's pretty boring. From the third area onward, the game seems to be incentivizing you to skip all the enemies by stopping time and running past them, because you can graze enemies to continually refill your time meter and all you get from killing them is money (which doesn't matter, I never went to the shop) or EXP (which as far as I can tell does nothing). This trend continues through the whole game. As rooms become more cramped and enemies become stronger and bulkier, you learn it's far easier to stop time and ignore everything than it is to bother fighting, which will have a much higher chance of you dying. At that point, all the collectibles and cool spells mean nothing. Why bother getting +10 MP or a shiny new spell if you're never going to use it against an enemy?
On a side note, Snail Time doesn't need MP or time points to activate, which seems odd considering the massive effect it can make on gameplay.
The bosses are even more disappointing, again due to the imbalance of the graze feature. Every boss is depressingly easy, because not only are most of their attacks laughably pathetic (Meiling's "super" attack is literally just one of her regular attacks but with a much longer startup, for crying out loud), but they all have one attack that you can abuse to gain tons of graze outside of stopped time, which basically refills half your health for free easily. They all also only have like three to five attacks at the most (even the final boss!), which combined with an HP pool that could bear to be cut in half and your base attack requiring that you use your MP, which recharges at the speed of a snail, means that 70% of bosses are you just dodging their attacks with ease while you wait for your MP to recharge. Collectibles yet again make no difference because the extra HP will just be full all the time, the extra MP will just reduce how fast it takes for you to drain it to zero, and the special moves all take more MP than they're worth as far as I can tell (though apparently Thousand Knives is overpowered to the point of being super unbalanced, but that just changes boss fights from "boring slog" to "spam without thinking", so that's a totally different problem). The game tries to disincentivise usage of the time stop during boss battles by firing attacks that only move in stopped time, but they don't bother doing it alongside attacks that move normally so the second that you see those attacks you can just stop time, let them fly offscreen, and just continue. The final boss is even more awful, because in addition to everything above, she has two phases and dying on the second phase because you don't know how to deal with the lasers the first time you see them forces you to take two minutes wearing down the first phase again, and aside from the cheap kill when the lasers come out the first time, said final boss is just as pathetic as the other bosses for all the same reasons.
The game's also super short, clocking in about 3 hours (probably more if you go collectible hunting, but why would you when they do almost nothing?) for a first playthrough. I can't really justify paying slightly under $20 for an unfun and boring journey that you can knock out in one night.
Also the game crashed against the final boss when I tried to graze her second phase in stopped time, so that's neat.
In summary, this game incentivizes you to skip all of its levels through timestop and slows to a crawl during bosses with attacks that pose no threat and an awful MP system.

How it is as a Touhou work
Touhou games are characterized by fun bosses where you have very little room to move and are always engaged with exciting and difficult new attacks. It's a series where you have to die a lot and persevere to eventually grasp the satisfaction of finally defeating the difficult spellcard you've been stuck on for god knows how long. In stark parallel, bosses in Luna Nights are hilariously easy, incredibly lenient, and honestly boring because you're always running out of MP and have to sit around doing nothing, a notion that's alien to any mainline Touhou game. Whereas the levels in Touhou games are challenges that you have to path out that are ultimately just leading up to the fun bosses, the levels of Luna Nights are obnoxiously difficult, orders of magnitude harder than the bosses, if you play them straight, and are total meaningless filler if you skip them with time stop.
So this game completely messes up the design philosophy of the actual Touhou games, but that was probably obvious by how the actual Touhou games are fun and this game isn't.

And now for some Touhou-related nitpicks!
None of these are really anything gameplay-related, but they bother me so I'm putting them here.
I could complain about how all the characters are from EoSD with exceptions that barely matter, but that's just me being irritable with the overrepresentation of one game in Touhou fanworks rather than Luna Nights itself. Even so, it hurts whenever I see another fangame that focuses on the SDM instead of a group that's more developed / could use more development, like the Undergrounders or Eientei or Myouren or literally any non-EoSD game.
Plus the game kinda makes limited use of / misuses the characters it has. Meiling does literally nothing interesting, but she gets a pass because she's the first boss. Marisa at least has Earthlight Ray, Master Spark, and some slave-type spell, but she's missing her trademark star bullets. Patchouli uses all her elements solo instead of ever combining them. Nitori uses a weird mech instead of her neato backpack. Flandre uses massive crystal wings instead of leaning into her huge retinue of interesting spellcards, with the only one making an appearance predictably being Laevateinn. Finally, Reimu uses the paper end of her weapon instead of the kicks and whacks that she's more known for.

This is a really good-looking game. I wish it was a good-playing one too.

Wish I could leave this game a mixed review because that is what it deserves IMO. I love Touhou it's a fun world with fun, and highly meme heavy, lore and characters. But if this game didn't have the Touhou license attached to it there is no way it would have "Overwhelmingly Positive" reviews.

The game plays well moment to moment. You are constantly balancing HP, MP, and Time (which grants the ability to stop time briefly) - all of which play off of and feed into each other in interesting ways especially with the "graze" mechanic which lets you recover resources by nearing enemies and their projectiles but not actually touching them. It can be a bit annoying sometimes but for the most part it works and is the games singular unique aspect.

Otherwise you have what might be one of the WORST Metroidvanias ever. The game literally has like 50 rooms in it, half of which are save rooms or just mostly empty hallways, and the actual rooms with content are annoying. Enemies in this game are all incredibly annoying, from fairies to spirits to stone faced discs that shoot interdimensional fruit loops. Everything is just annoying (but easy) to kill and it gets old really, really fast. Also there are several rooms where you get instantly attacked if you don't remember the room and immediately pause time as you enter it. Cool, great game design guys. But honestly these parts don't matter - they are all just filler for the games actual purpose which is a series of boss battles of increasing difficulty until you get right up into the absurd.

There's just not a lot here. A really, really weak metroidvania style game in appearance that is dispersed as thin as mechanically possible to give an excuse to engage in a string of boss battles that by the end are ridiculously difficult. Sure, the graphics are pretty great, excellent actually. But the music and audio design all kind of suck, I can't remember the music the second I'm back to the Windows desktop. The story is a nonsensical soup that seems translated poorly and doesn't do any of these fun and interesting characters any reasonable level of justice.

The bottom line - are you Touhou fan? Give it a shot. Are you not a Touhou fan? There is zero reason to play this, there are waaaaaay better takes on this formula on Steam and way better ways to get into Touhou. I mean just look at all the top reviews, see how they are all just ASCII Cirnos and Touhou "in" jokes? Tells you all you need to know about this mixed bags artificially inflated review score. For such a massive franchise (at least in Japan) it's shocking how few actual proper games it has gotten, so when this came along it didn't need to be good it just needed to be Touhou and everyone forced themselves to love it. What we have here is a crushingly difficult bullet hell style boss rush pretending to be something it is not so more people will buy it, and while as a crushingly difficult bullet hell style boss rush it is decent it still feels like a poor usage of this world and to me I find that the most disappointing aspect of all.

This game was middling at best, but definitely not worth the cost (and I got it on sale). It was very light on the metroidvania part of the game (the reason I bought it) having very few abilities, most of which are basically only used to get to the next section. The bosses are super easy, most of them requiring the same strategy over and over again. Also, the story made no sense. I'm not sure if there is more to the story that I'm not aware of, and honestly I don't really care because what was presented was convoluted and incoherent. The art style was kind of cool, but the music was super annoying. Basically, when I beat the game I was both relieved that I didn't have to play it anymore, and disappointed that there wasn't more to it. If you want a short and easy pixel-graphic (barely) metroidvania game, then go ahead and try it, but I like my games to have a little more substance.

Pretty fun and frenetic combat system (though its difficulty pretty much gets undermined by its own mechanics that basically just give you infinite health) Solid pixel art and animation. Painfully short, completely devoid of any actual "Metroidvania" mechanics beyond the most basic of colored door needs colored key, so it's pretty much just a linear shot from start to finish. Dialog is abysmal and storyline completely devoid of any relevance and just falls on a very tired trope of "It's a fantasy dream world where a bunch of characters from some other property end up together for no reason" and ends pretty abruptly. Again it's decently fun but holy cow I beat it in three hours on my first go so it really makes those negatives stand out a lot.

I didn't actually dislike Luna Nights. I think it's a neat little game. Its most interesting feature is certainly Sakuya's ability to slow down and freeze time, which while certainly not an unheard of ability in videogames, it's always fun to play around with. Time manipulation shines especially against bosses, where it'll definitely come in handy when you'll have to avoid their bullet-hell style attacks, or certain particularly quick moves.

In general, boss battles are what Luna Nights does best. Those are fun and exciting - perhaps a little bit too long for my liking, although not by a huge margin. But the thing is, that's about it; everything else Luna Nights does is average at best. This includes, perhaps surprisingly, combat: while bosses deserve praise, the same can't be said for average enemies, who are generally not that interesting to fight, nor particularly inspired in design. The game world lacks in terms of design as well; some areas might be a little bit nicer than others, but none stands out. This is especially poor news for a metroidvania, a genre that traditionally wants the player to revisit older areas once they've unlocked upgrades: it's harder to remember where you saw an item you couldn't access if there's nothing memorable about the game's world. In addition, retreading your steps often feels a lot more bothersome that it is worth, due to the way areas are connected, due to obstacles littered around the world and the fact that enemies respawn every time you exit and re-enter an area.

Luna Nights is also a very small game. I just beat the final boss (although the game expects me to beat it again? Not sure, I'll try to do that in the near future), and Steam indicates I have played the game for 5 hours; there is also not much to explore beyond what you're supposed to see as you're trying to reach the end, just a few upgrades littered here and there, but they're not that many. Finally, the story is also barely worth paying attention to - I guess it might make a little more sense if you're a Touhou fan, but for me it was mostly nonsensical and seemingly poorly translated rambling.

So in conclusion. It's an okay game, a six out of ten in my book. It has some neat ideas, but fails to couple them with a solid gameplay (again, with the exception of boss battles) and good world building. It also never really manages to shake the impression that what you're playing is basically a fan-made game, well made as far as fan games go, but still fan-made.

If you're looking for a competent metroidvania, play Hollow Knight or Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight before you play this.

Don"t get me wrong this game is not bad with a castlevania'ish style of game play but for me was really short and kind of bland.
I guess its a more fan base game then anything. You don"t get to pilot a mech ever and the trailer for the game is kind of miss-leading to the game play. Not bad ,not great . In my opinion its ok, not that great....And you can't disable the music or turn it down its always on and full-blast!