Marisa of Liartop Mountain Demo Impression

Some of the stranger happenings include books discussing how to make money doing nothing, and Reimu getting into a sumo contest with powerful rabbit men.

Sometimes travelling to a fantastical world starts with a good book.  That’s the thought behind the opening of Unknown X’s Marisa of Liartop Mountain, where everything is filtered through one girl’s search for her friend that takes her to a magical library.  The presentation of this turn-based tabletop fairy tale feels like a book.  A calm-voice narrates protagonist’s Reimu’s adventure, who is moved around like a board game piece by four members of the Scarlet Devil Mansion, who read this book like a choose-your-own-adventure novel.  There’s a quirky and fun story brewing in this interesting title and RPGamer got an early chance to play the updated demo available now.

The Scarlet Devil Mansion group introduces themselves to the audience as a bored bunch looking for something to do.  When their knowledgeable friend Patchouli suggests a tabletop game complete with boardgame pieces and a book, this entices the Scarlet sisters Flandre and Remilia as well as their maid Sakuya to sit in and play.  The book is a tale of Reimu searching for her lost friend Marisa.  After a meeting time to see shooting stars comes and goes, Reimu finds Marisa’s typically messy house spotless, except for a giant book in a middle of a room.  This book teleports Reimu to a magical library.  The addition of these four, on top of Reimu, the villain, and the in-game narrator makes the viewpoints of the story feel very cluttered during the course of the demo.

This library is a labyrinthine sixteen-floor structure that Reimu must navigate through with ladders and stairs that loop around and connect in various ways, which is often cumbersome to traverse.  The map is difficult to interact with; however, figuring out the puzzle of how every event is connected is fun to piece together, as players meet odd characters and find clues to uncover what happened to Marisa.  Combat options, as well as a few of the story choices, rely on dice rolls to determine success.  For the most part, these dice rolls are geared towards the player’s favour, particularly if they explore to gain as many dice as possible and take heed of scattered hints that help make future combat events fairer.

The girls from Scarlet Devil Mansion often have things to interject.

Every decision made in Marisa of Liartop Mountain is made by committee.  The Scarlet Devil Mansion quartet all have different suggestions on how Reimu should proceed.  This is conveyed as the options on screen for what to do next in key situations, though Reimu does have some agency based on what enemies in combat are doing or how NPCs react to her presence.  Key influential situations are designated by each of the girl’s symbols, and at the end of each in-game story chapter, an MVP is chosen, and a special die is given as a reward for the next part of the story.

Usually dice rolls need high numbers for success, but some situations can ask for low, odd, or even results also.  This interestingly leads to some dice manipulation based on abnormal dice that can be collected as rewards from one of the Mansion girls during a level up, or from finding them along the way as treasure.  These dice have a diverse range, from only rolling 1s, to shifting a 1-6 to a 4-9, which are just a few possibilities that help to manipulate results.

Some exploration situations cannot be entered unless Reimu is feeling light-hearted or heavy-hearted.  There are a lot of points to switch between light and heavy-heartedness, which helps to navigate the game’s various puzzles, such as clearing a chasm by floating over with the flying books or by Reimu holding her ground against rampaging sumo rabbit men.  Solving the puzzle of each room to make it closer to the library’s final boss fight connects together decently well, and it’s fun to find the next clue that continues the journey, since the absurdity of each situation is amusing to see unfold.

Just a discussion on how obtaining a light heart from books can make Reimu weightless.

Reimu has plenty of chances to succeed with random chance.  She starts with twenty health, and even the toughest monsters in the demo require a lot of hits to endanger Reimu and she only needs a few successful hits to take down most enemies.  This is especially true if the hints are all obtained before tackling tougher fights, so there’s not much to worry about.

Some dice rolls can be bypassed by using Reimu’s cheating points (CP).  As story choices, these rarely appear, but do act as an instant win for any situation Reimu finds herself in.  They are also used to reroll dice during combat to keep trying for a favourable result.  As levelling up occurs, players can choose results that boost CP, attack, or max HP that effectively makes combat hard to lose, as long as dice rolls can hit some of the higher numbers needed in later fights.

The Scarlet Devil Mansion committee has chimed in, what will the player decide?

While the moment-to-moment gameplay is full of small triumphs and frustrations, the absurdity of the situations and the characters in this library make each event compelling.  The narrator’s smooth cadence spoken in Japanese evokes imagery of a child being read a nursery rhyme, which is the only thing that keeps them feeling different than the multitude of in-game character voices that are dialogue only.  Some of the stranger happenings include books discussing how to make money doing nothing, and Reimu getting into a sumo contest with powerful rabbit men.

There’s a lot to still uncover within the world of Marisa of Liartop Mountain.  The library is only one chapter of the greater whole, and there a lot of dice left to collect and characterizations to explore in this quirky tabletop fairy tale.  Gamers can try out Marisa of the Liartop Mountain for themselves with the demo available now, before being able to get their hands on the full version when it releases on September 19, 2025, for PC and Nintendo Switch.

Disclosure: This article is based on a build of the game provided by the publisher.