Kubinashi Recollection

I’ve been juggling a couple of long games lately (Fantasy Maiden Wars NG+ and Caligula Effect 2 at the moment) so I’ve also been playing some short games during breaks, and one of those games was Kubinashi Recollection. I’ve known the artist (paradot) for a while so when I saw the art I thought “hey, that’s familiar!” I read the words puzzle platformer and figured I’m in.

And honestly, this truly is a Touhou puzzle game. It’s fun, has great art, has great music, but perhaps most damningly of all, it’s hard. So, so, hard.

To give a brief rundown of the game, it’s a pretty straightforward concept. Each stage has an end goal and an optional puzzle piece to collect. There are traps/hazards and resources on each stage, with the main gimmick since you’re Sekibanki that you can use your head as a bouncy spring. You get a limited number of heads though and you can either choose to use your head as a spring or shoot it as a projectile to destroy blocks/collect/various other things. The puzzle part of the game comes from figuring out how to use your limited resources to get to the end, but because I’m me I wanted to collect the optional item on every stage so that was a big part of it too.

The platformer aspect of the game comes from how difficult it is to platform! There are a lot of traps/hazards and while there’s nothing like dodging danmaku and the precision platforming isn’t even necessarily overly difficult (with some minor exceptions), it CAN get very challenging.

Now, when you combine these two parts together, you get a very challenging game of figuring out your routing which already is hard, then executing the plan without messing up. The beginning levels aren’t too bad but the later levels get very complex and it hurt my brain. A lot.

Of course that wouldn’t be enough though. There’s also a SPEEDRUNNING aspect of the game where you try to get to the end as fast as possible. I will confess. I gave up. I get exactly one B medal on the very first stage of the game (after retrying multiple times) and decided that I’d just focus on the puzzle aspect. I do think that once you know the routing that you need to do it’s probably not thaaaat bad, but it already took me a lot of effort to figure out the routing and to do it flawlessly! Asking me to do it again but faster is a lot!

That’s all to say though that this is a very satisfying game to figure out. Getting some of the puzzle pieces felt very rewarding even if I’m pretty sure on some stages I did not get them the intended way. The story’s cute, the characters are of course fun and endearing, and I like how each world has a new mechanic added. Each world also isn’t very long, and each stage is quite short too.

If there was one complaint I’d have, it’s that some puzzle pieces were a little annoyingly hidden. I tried to plan my route from the start of the stage but some puzzle pieces were hidden where you couldn’t see them so you’d have to trial and error a bit to actually find them. Also some stages I think were brutally punishing, even if each stage was at max like 5 minutes, one mistake near the end could mean you’d have to restart the entire thing. Thankfully they’re not very long stages but yeah, it could get rough.

Again though, not an easy game. At the end of the game they show you a combined total of all the time through each level and I think my combined total was… somewhere between 2-3 hours? But my actual total playtime is closer to 12. Even accounting for a generous 2 afk hours, that’s like 7+ hours of failing/retrying.

However the cuteness and satisfying feeling of solving the puzzles made up for it!