The Must-Play Cozy Game You’ve Never Heard Of

Touhou Project is a bullet-hell franchise that has launched a thousand fan creations. The franchise has main titles going all the way back to the PC-98 era (and somehow never officially translated into English), and it even sports its own dedicated convention. It also has more fan games than main titles, ranging from a rhythm game bubble blaster, to a Metroidvania, to the cozy cafe management simulator that is Touhou Mystia’s Izakaya. The latter recently got a Switch release that includes all five DLCs, or you can pick up the whole bundle on Steam for around the same price. This review will touch on the DLCs, but the main game is what I’ve fully beaten. This game can easily be over 100 hours to full clear everything.

You don’t need to be a longtime fan or be up on all the lore of the Touhou Project to enjoy this game. Just be aware of two “rules”:

1. Everyone is a yokai (Japanese folklore creatures, usually monstrous). The ones who aren’t yokai are demons. The ones who aren’t yokai or demons will proudly tell you what variety of abnormal human they are.
2. This is a story of the mundane fantastic. Magicians expend vast amounts of magical power to theft-proof their books; the time-stopping head maid of the vampire lady wants help catching fish; and the fate of the world hinges on you, as a timid little night sparrow, running a successful streetside cafe.

Speaking of, let’s talk about…

The Mundane Fantastic

This game is the opposite of magical realism, a genre where the fantastic invades reality and subtly bends it out of its normal shape. Here, the fantastic is reality, and what we consider normalcy is the invader that continually warps the fabric into a delightfully charming blend of whimsicality, one that feels far more normal and comfortable than a world populated by monsters has any right or reason to be.

The game opens with a brief tutorial in which your character, Mystia, is about to serve a special guest. You’re walked through the basic controls of running the izakaya (a type of casual Japanese bar that, in this game, specializes in grilled lamprey) and serve the creepy starving guest a handful of dishes before she starts bombarding you with requests faster than you can possibly keep up. In the end, the guest destroys the entire izakaya, and a mysterious figure asks if you want to try again, before doing “something” to cause you to wake up thinking the entire experience was just a dream. But of course, as the player, you know it was more than that. 

You don’t have time to dwell on it, though, because, outside, your best friend is being threatened by a bakeneko over some debts. Debts which you then take on, thus putting you in the position of needing to make enough money at your izakaya to pay it off. (If this sounds like Recettear, I thought so too. But this game is much more forgiving than Recettear.)

This is about the level of stakes you’ll get used to throughout the game. The fate of the world game always rests on your ability to keep your izakaya profitable. It leads to enough stakes to put pressure on you to keep getting better (after all, that gluttonous monster of a guest is waiting), but keeps things calm and cozy enough to keep it firmly in the genre of cozy sims (after all, it’s just an izakaya).

Variety is the Spice of…

The actual izakaya management sim is actually only about half the game, and it’s not even the only game you’ll play while you play that half of the game (try saying that ten times fast). About a week into the game, you’ll be presented with a rhythm mini-game that will prompt you to sing while you cook (you are a bird, after all… and in the full Touhou lore, you have a two-girl rock band with your best friend, the one whose debts you bought). The windows are pretty generous (speaking as a rhythm game player), and the reward for a full combo is a bonus: either guests stop losing patience, they start finishing their meals instantly, or you get the ability to throw dishes from across the room instead of walking over to the tables.

You also don’t spend your whole time at the izakaya playing fill-in-the-blank with customer’s meals. The “rare guests” (read: everyone who has a name in the main Touhou games) won’t tell you what they want. They’ll tell you what type of food they’re in the mood for, and you’ll have to craft a dish that matches it. And you can really “craft” it, because, not long into the game, you’ll unlock the option to add ingredients to the dish to add tags to it. So if a customer wants something salty, and you know they also like fruit, you can add grapes to their salty dish and they might like it even more. These guests also reward you if you meet their orders and preferences exceptionally well–and, of course, they inflict penalties if you go too far off-script.

That’s the izakaya management portion of the game. But what about the rest? The izakaya is only open in the evenings, and you wake up at the same time in the morning each day. (Fortunately, since the izakaya has fixed hours, you can’t end up staying up too late and oversleeping like in some farming sims.) Well, time progresses in intervals of 30 minutes, and only when you take an action that says it progresses time. So the time management part of the game becomes easy and focused. Specific things progress the clock:

• Gathering ingredients from various gathering spots to use at the izakaya later.
• Traveling between places.
• Inviting rare guests to your izakaya (this is useful when you’re trying to progress friendship–more on that later).
• Anything else that says it will take 30 minutes.

This leads to a time management portion of the game that becomes a sort of puzzle mini-game in itself. You can just about get to every region in one day, and shopping doesn’t spend any time; but some ingredients have to be gathered, and if you want to do that, you’ll have to choose where you focus. But since the clock doesn’t move if you’re idle, you have all the time you need to decide how best to spend it.

Welcome to Gensokyo

You don’t have to love or even know the Touhou Project series to fall in love with the characters in this game. From Kyouko, the friend whose debt you buy off at the start of the game; to Wriggle, the best bug girl ever; to the true identity of that gluttonous guest. All of the characters in Gensokyo are charming, and all of them shine in their respective stories as your timid little night sparrow navigates the world of running a progressively larger and more well-known izakaya. (And oh, how well-known you can get. By the time you reach the fourth DLC areas, you’ve got a paparazzo breathing down your neck for a scoop, enough money to just hit “buy all” when you visit a merchant, and a line wrapping clear around the screen when your izakaya closes every night.)

Like any self-respecting cozy sim, this game has a friendship meter, with heartwarming and laugh-out-loud side stories locked behind leveling up. Some of your endgame quests change or can only be cleared based on who you have fully maxed out (there’s a particular “epilogue” scene that I’m holding out on until I’ve maxed everyone), and each level of friendship with any character unlocks a new recipe, so it’s worth chasing down everyone and showering them with the best food when they walk into your izakaya.

I did run into a bug where Steam Cloud only synced the first two rows of save files. I’m not sure if that’s still the case; I just started only saving in those spots since I never used the old saves anyway. That was mildly frustrating but easy to work around, and I have not noticed any other bugs in the game.

And what’s that? Is this–it is! A cozy game with no inventory system!! You buy the things, they go in your box, and there’s unlimited space for unlimited stacks (or if there is a limit to the stacks I’ve never found it, and I buy every ingredient from every merchant almost every day).

In fact, I can’t think of a single thing I would realistically want changed in this game. Sure, I can think of macros that would be nice to be able to implement, but they aren’t needed, and they’d probably clutter the controls more than they’d help. I’d like if I could save during the day, but it also makes sense to only save after running the izakaya for the night (I can’t imagine trying to remember what I was doing if I could save at in-game 2 p.m. and come back two real-time days later). This is as close to a perfect game as I can think of from the cozy side of the gaming world. The Touhou name might intimidate or chase people away, but don’t let it. This can be your gateway into the Touhou Project, or it can be your only encounter with it. There’s still enough to love.

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