It's likely not a gamble to say that most people are creatures of habit. Apply it universally, or apply it merely to hobbies such as video games, but precedent guides our actions unconsciously beyond the acknowledged metrics of "what kind of media do I like"--in its context, the question that drives the means of engagement can turn to "what kind of media can I like?" Such are my own hangups and perceived barriers in breaking off from my personal comfort zones, "home" genres, and general areas of interests. The puzzle-oriented niche of platforming games is a particular space where I don't often dare to stray, both because of the concepts often not aligning with personal preferences, but more pressingly and insidiously, the lack of confidence in believing I could hang with the particular challenges posed by the game type. Pattern recognition and twitch reflexes are one thing, pitting number against number and organizing virtual character sheets another, and coordinated audiovisual timing yet another--but trials of multilayered spatial riddles, to be solved with a strict diet of interlocking verbs? Our brains are all different, and this is something that mine dreads, whether it has real cause to or not, and so I often abstain--out of habit--even if something in the wider genre catches my eye.
Kubinashi Recollection by developer Kyushoku Toban and publisher Phoenixx then needed an angle for me to get a foot in its proverbial door, and as so often that happens with me, it managed that on the wings of extant fandom, in being a Touhou Project fan game. The series proper, for being primarily a shooter lineage, inspires many derivative works that often do not linger in the source material's genre but apply and adapt it to something totally unfamiliar and novel. It's what makes following any of the hundreds upon hundreds projects so exciting: should you possess the basic common denomination of "Touhou's pretty neat" then you are already halfway primed to receive the other half of the equation that any such adaptive work is espousing. In my own experience, I've often gone where those pre-existing preferences have pointed me toward: the RPGs, the rhythm games, the search actions. Outside of fulfilling those idealized intersections of interests, another way such fan-driven creative work can operate, and which can act as a testament to its uplifting power, is that in providing a simple hook of initial attention can push people outside of their self-imposed bubbles, beyond the boundaries they thought dictated their limitations.
That hook for me in the case of Kubinashi Recollection was its sheer premise in the context of its source material. The longstanding trends in adaptive preferentiality in derivative Touhou works do not need to be outlined here, except to state that Sekibanki as this game's protagonist is unusual for the baseline. As a stage 2 boss from the 14th game circa 2013, she is both a minor presence in the series's ensemble, and strictly a resident of its relative "modern" era, whose cast have not been privy to the years upon years of development and shared consciousness in fan works, especially during the fever height of the series's pop culture hegemony that predated her and hers. That reality is in itself a kind of freedom, as neither official nor fan consensus has much of a definitive vision of who Sekibanki is or under which premise she could be portrayed--she is simply a yokai among yokais, a blank slate rokurokubi horror. Mutability and narrative versatility is what powers Touhou at large to begin with, but it's an aspect that shines even truer when drawing from a cast of literal hundreds and focusing on one who has never really been familiarized with the limelight's glare.
Kubinashi's way of centering Sekibanki is through her primary definition in myth and folklore: she has a good head (or a few) on her shoulders, and she will damn well use it whether it's affixed in place or not. Sekibanki's adventures will take her on a dreamscape world tour through the associative memories of many fellow Gensokyo residents, for a stage tally of five stages per each of the ten worlds. Those travels are facilitated by any and all means she has access to in charting her way: as a jump 'em protagonist, Sekibanki's basic movement doesn't amount to much more than a reasonably precise and fluid jump arc of about her own height and no more. It is through the use of her head stack (allotted in specific numbers per stage--the game's NINE HEADS MODE is its thematically delightful and apt functional easy mode) that she actually makes literal headway anywhere, as they are her most versatile and plentiful navigational tool in a framework where mobility is at a premium and always the result of utilizing the environment to one's favour. A dropped head can be jumped onto for rebounding higher into the sky than mere legs afford; they can be thrown to break through blocks; they can be picked up again and carried to and fro for a mobile resource pool even when "expended" from the stock; they carry the same properties of environmental interaction as Sekibanki prime does in terms of interacting with key blocks or picking up items--but crucially are not harmed by hazards like spike beds and other instantly deadly barriers. Literally using one's head forms the central navigational and puzzle design thesis the entire game relies upon, constantly mixing up, elaborating and resetting the rules as each new world introduces new secondary stage gimmicks and concepts, for an excellently curved and layered learning process that does its utmost to prepare players for the increasingly elaborate challenges to come.
Even without relying upon the omniscient allure of the Nine Heads, simply reaching the goal in each stage is a relatively doable task. The game's real body and soul rests in the optional puzzle piece placed within each stage, as the secondary and arguably, true objective of each puzzle. It's not about simply reorienting one's goal to another end, but having to manage and mediate the demands of both in parallel; the puzzle pieces only "count" if they're obtained during the same run as the primary goal itself is reached. A fallback stack of heads and other resources that might not be stretched to the limit in simply trying for the goal will be expended to their last as the challenge becomes figuring out a way to maximize the layered reuse of each possible object that helps you clear that one gap, or grab the one item that you need to open a new path. When you think you've got a handle on how to best make use of popping bubble blocks, you might need to apply that certitude into newfound configurations that mix head management, spring placement, bomb block explosions, and the strategic timing of when to pick up keys and on which block to use them. The new play concepts don't ever stop, until the point you're naturally multitasking half-a-dozen different, fluctuating factors and somehow the game's design language is managing to keep your brain from overheating through its gentle, invisible nudging.
The more you play a game like Kubinashi, the more you come to recognize the simultaneous rigidity and flexibility of its design. The puzzles are exacting, often demanding optimal use of resources at a baseline of play when going for the puzzle pieces in particular. Yet there's still an in-game time trial and speed-run friendly component to the game, so how does that come about? Is it all in the execution? It is, but it's also not a simple heads or tails proposition. The first true hurdles I experienced in the game arrived at about halfway, as I simply could not reason a way to manage my resources to both grab the puzzle piece and finish the stage. It gnawed upon me, and left me to start improvising with game physics and inputs to discover a solution: there is a possibility--of a frame or two's worth--to input a grab at the exact time one throws a head or similar rebounding object in mid-air, allowing to bring with them the very object they were using as an airborne, expendable double-jump platform, and continuing the chain as long as one pleases and is able to. It's a preposterous execution threshold--something I could not reliably pull off thereafter at any later point in the game despite incorporating it into my playstyle regularly from then on. Other variations exist, such as timing a similar input with a later stage's teleport portal item, in picking it up from the moment one materializes through it. These are maneuvers that feel like "exploits" when you perform them, but they are absolutely predicted and programmed into the game purposefully--they exist at too categorically a predictive level with the level design for it not to be the case.
When you come into the realization that you can--and could have--been pulling off such exacting feats all along, it breaks open and transforms your relationship with the rest of the game no matter at what "level" you choose to play it at. Later stages can still be understood and interacted with as "intended", to see all the recursive, criss-crossing paths one must take to solve the environmental narrative in the projected way, but there is nothing stopping one from applying advanced movement techniques and functionally sidestepping entire segments or halves of stages simply for the joy of the act being possible. That this kind of relationship to player mobility exists in a platformer that's so highly regimented in its tile-based level design and its segregated micro-objective play makes those "game-breaking" moments all the more special, because they are being allowed in the milieu of a sequential puzzle game where the totality of what the game fundamentally is comprises of these specific challenges, and yet you are still given license to improvise around their formula at will. It's the delight in figuring out the wall jump exists in Super Metroid, applied to a genre permutation with completely different experiential goals and still able to elicit the same kind of fundamental joy of movement and possibility within its own context.
Kubinashi Recollection hooked me with its promises of intriguing novelty on the pre-existing fandom end, justified the rest with ingenious individual design sense and concepts, and by the other end of it, made me a firm believer on the aspects that initially drew me to it in the first place. There is a textual story here, and it's uncomplicated, sweet and saccharine, treating its cast superficially but gently and never relying on the insular ends of fandom. Its simple-at-a-glance visual expression belies the confidence with which its visual assets are employed, and importantly how evocative and legible they are in the patchwork chaos of its layouts--it is not a game incapable of impressing purely on sights alone either, as its apt use of parallax scenes testifies. And as ever, a Touhou production manages to make its audio perhaps the showpiece above the rest, in this case relying on the vast repertoire of music the series identity revolves around as much as anything. For consisting almost entirely of remixes, Kubinashi reaches a musical identity of its own through song choice but particularly in the stylistic treatment each track receives and how they're used within the game. The dramatic piano and trumpet compositions are transformed into trance-like dance beats and loops utilized together with occasional vocal sampling, facilitating the long sessions of overthink they serve as backdrop for. At the same time, they interact with the game's presentation as they do: a memorable world's stage concept matches disappearing and reappearing blocks to the rhythm of the BGM, and as a game completely absent of any "bosses" in its structure, the sensation is still conveyed as each world's latter two stages either rearrange or introduce a newly intensified track to signal their increased challenges, often introducing new layers of instrumentation in the process.
There's a pithy turn of phrase people sometimes evoke to describe their conflicted relationships with fandom: "it's a good game, but not a good [series representative]." Whether that's due to impossible to meet expectations, or the misaligned associations with media past and present, it's something that's regularly used to give individual works their backhanded dues while still denigrating them under the umbrella of expectant fandom. Sometimes accusations arise in an adjacent direction that the only reason why a given game or other media work has any attention directed at it over hundreds of its ignored peers is because it benefits from the residue of its attached license. These are often remarks made with an air of dismissal and sour grapes, but in cases like Kubinashi Recollection, I readily acknowledge and embrace its relationship to its creative context and my own brushing against it: I would never have played a game like this if I didn't want to find out more about the adventures of this lonesome dullahan under the willows, based on prior contact and affection. That it was able to leverage a passing whimsy such as that and through it make a case for itself in legitimizing an entire genre for my own play context showcases just how effectively it was able to rise above any such projected cynicism with its head held high.
