The Haunted Hoard: Happy Stealing with Kirisame Marisa (PC)

PC horror games in the 2010s seem pretty prone to fads. Games like Slender, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and Baldi’s Basics have managed to garner widespread attention thanks in part to the Youtube community embracing vicarious frights through well-known personalities as well as given younger players some relatively safe titles that still can offer up sudden scares without crossing too far into the genuinely upsetting. These fad games will captivate the internet for a time, and during their tenure as top dog, imitators inevitably emerge looking to ride the wave of success, but there is one barrier preventing many from drawing any attention towards themselves, that being they have no real draw outside of being a barefaced copy of the current hit thing. Happy Stealing with Kirisame Marisa, however, hit on a rather ingenious way to earn itself attention despite being a watered down version of Baldi’s Basics, that being by using the Touhou franchise’s openness to fan development to reskin the game to hopefully lure in fans of that series.

Happy Stealing with Kirisame Marisa, presented as 与雾雨魔理沙一起偷重要的东西 ~ Happy Stealing with Kirisame Marisa on the Steam store, is a horror game despite the Touhou series being well known for its large cast of cute magical girls. As Marisa, you only have one real goal in this game, and that’s to collect six books from Koumakan, that Japanese name for the Touhou location known more commonly in English as the Scarlet Devil Mansion. While at first Koumakan seems a bright cheery place that looks oddly like a schoolhouse, the moment you pick up the first book, the lights go out and all the doors open, Koumakan’s librarian Patchouli now infuriated with you for stealing the floating book she left out in the hallway. Patchouli will now chase Marisa wherever she goes in the mansion, moving along at a predictable and loud pace behind you. No matter where you go in the mansion, you can usually hear the sound of her lurching after you as an indicator that she’s taken some steps in her relentless chase. If Patchouli does manage to catch you, it’s an instant death, with a red screen coming up abruptly with an odd “Full of sores…” message to accompany your defeat. It’s quick to get back into things and try again, but being on the run isn’t particularly exciting. Patchouli does get faster with each book you pick up, and the book stealing process is made slightly difficult by the need to stand in place and watch a bar go up before you can actually pick it up, but if you are in danger while trying to get a book, it’s not too hard to disengage and try again later after you’ve put some distance between you and the librarian.

Most of the game is just constantly being chased by Patchouli, ducking your head into open rooms to see if one of the six books are waiting on a table inside. You can run if you feel you need to put some distance between you and your angry librarian pursuer, and learning the general layout of the building will benefit you on follow-up tries to help you understand how to more quickly get in and grab books before she can catch up to you. The game being in the dark does make it hard to make a mental map at first, but besides a few rooms with two points of entry, there aren’t very many unusual areas you’ll need to remember, the rest of the building mostly just halls of rooms you can gradually make your way through without issue.

Thankfully, Happy Stealing with Kirisame Marisa isn’t just a chase until you win or lose, there’s a few small touches to make the affair just the slightest bit more involved. The first way is that when you check a room, if it doesn’t contain a book, it will often contain one of the power-ups that can give you an edge. You can only carry one at a time, but they include a beam that blasts Patchouli back to give you some room, a watch that slows down time briefly, and a cup of tea that can refill your stamina meter so you can run more. When Patchouli is at her fastest and you’re on the final books, these can prove slightly useful, but Patchouli is technically not the only Touhou character you have to worry about in this so-called mansion. Even if you do find a book in a room, you must first check if it’s breathing, as it might be Koakuma in disguise waiting to end your run. The maid Sakuya is also present, although she’s more of an annoyance than a true worry. She’ll pop up randomly when you try to enter a room and teleport you to some other part of the building, and sometimes you can even use her to get away from the real threat for a time. The last threat is one that is meant to discourage running, as if you run around too much you’ll wake the vampire Flandre who will come at you incredibly fast to almost assuredly kill you and force a restart. The odd thing is the game doesn’t really push you to run all that often since Patchouli is so slow and is incredibly easy to bait around the Koumakan. I had to deliberately force Flandre out by running around madly. The game doesn’t explain any hazard until it hits you, so you will likely die to Koakuma before you know she exists and won’t know about the run restriction until you face its consequences.

The horror in the game is done quite oddly. Turning out the lights is a good step to making the player uneasy, bumbling around the dark being an easy mild fear to evoke, but any chance of your opposition being terrifying goes right out the window the first time you see them. The Touhou girls, despite a rather nice image of Patchouli on the title screen, are all drawn deliberately bad in the actual horror segment of the game, their bodies incapable of articulation and just sort of gliding along the ground when they even make efforts to move. You never actually see Koakuma and Sakuya bursts into doorways like a target popping up in a shooting gallery, but Patchouli and Flandre just slide at you at their set paces. The three girls you do see are basically sketchy outlines where the colors of the characters are drawn in long MSPaint brushes to at least look a bit like they’re human-shaped. The game Happy Stealing with Kirisame Marisa is aping, Baldi’s Basics, has terrible visuals deliberately as well, but that game was trying to hearken back the primitive computer generated graphics of 90s educational games, while the bad drawings here are just done because Baldi’s Basics had bad graphics. There is no real horror to what you’re up against here, their only way of startling a player being that they can spring out suddenly. Accidentally picking up Koakuma or having Sakuya leap out are base level pop scares that do ensure there’s something to get surprised by in this game, but even the regular graphics have their faults, the 3D walls sometimes not loading in and letting you see what’s in a room as you approach. Not only is it deliberately amateurish at parts, but the parts that should be simple and solid don’t always behave properly, further supporting the idea this game was likely quickly put together to cash in on a horror game craze.

Besides those tiny jump scares, Happy Stealing with Kirisame Marisa doesn’t succeed at much else. It only takes a few short runs to see everything the game has, and from there it’s not hard to formulate a way to almost guarantee yourself a victory. Patchouli’s movement is predictable and easy to outmaneuver after you’ve seen it in motion once or twice, the other obstacles are easy to account for, and the book collecting just comes down to not making mistakes because you can almost always squeeze by your pursuer if you really do have to make a getaway. Your power-ups almost feel like an unnecessary touch since the game is already easy enough to overcome without them, and even when you start off not knowing much, all save the most panicky of people will find the terror rather tepid. All you are doing is running about and stopping briefly when you need to pick up a book. The game very likely isn’t trying to engage the player in any way. It has tapped into the same kind of merchandising that lead to people slapping G.I. Joe on lunchboxes. That lunchbox isn’t more fun because it has a show you like on it, but it looks a bit better and evokes memories of something that did actually put in work to get you to like it.  And if you aren’t a fan of Touhou, it’s hard to imagine anything in this game clicking for you, as it’s essentially a joke about the staff of the Scarlet Devil Mansion being inserted into a Baldi’s Basics ripoff, the joke not having much more substance to it besides who would play what dangerous role.

THE VERDICT: Happy Stealing with Kirisame Marisa may be able to get away with stealing the gameplay of Baldi’s Basics and the characters of Touhou, but it didn’t manage to grab any of the appeal of either title during it’s little heist. The Touhou elements are just draped over the boiled down elements of a popular horror title, the game hoping you’re in on the same inside joke but not even doing much else outside the concept to make it amusing. Running around the building collecting books is easy to figure out and the threats you face can almost instantly be accommodated after you have your first encounter with them. While it can hit you with some effective pop scares in the dark that work solely because they’re sudden, the game on the whole only has the connective tissue needed so that you can’t instantly beat it, lacking the heart of a product that’s actually trying to engage you rather than cash in on two popular things other people made.

And so, I give Happy Stealing with Kirisame Marisa for PC…

A TERRIBLE rating. As odd as it may seem that this game doesn’t earn a spot at the very bottom of the barrel, Happy Stealing with Kirisame Marisa is not a complete and total failure. The pop scares are effective and the darkness makes things feel a touch spookier than they really are, playing into that safe sort of horror that can appeal even to horror-averse audiences like young children. Of course, the pointless Microsoft Paint images don’t actually contribute to that since they’re meaningless in context, and the Touhou representation here is just as meaningless outside of making people actually give this game the time of day. That time they do give it starts off not completely terrible as well, as you do have to look about the mansion and learn about the place you must now escape safely, it’s just a shame the building is so bland and your tasks in it are easy once you have the information you need to execute them properly. Difficulty only exists until you learn how the world works, and that doesn’t take too long.

Happy Stealing with Kirisame Marisa is not bad because it jumped on a fad and used an open license intellectual property to further ride it. It’s bad because the game is a generally hollow experience. It’s got some ideas that could work in a full-fledged title, and it’s very likely some of the things in this game could be implemented into a more effective game. Koakuma posing as a book is an interesting idea, but it crumbles the moment you’re aware of it and the other parts of the game can’t support it. Checking for it is easy and quick and nothing can really harass you properly for taking that moment to check, with most every system seeming to just exist as an independent idea rather than ones that work together to make the gameplay more involved. Whether or not you feel like you’re in on the surface level joke this game is making, it’s doubtful that this title’s stealing will actually make you happy.