Kazuma Kaneko’s Tsukuyomi began life as a mobile game before shutting down and being delisted, only to re-emerge on Nintendo Switch and Steam with the microtransactions stripped out and a decidedly heftier price tag attached. The premise is fairly straightforward: an elite group is tasked with ascending a colossal megastructure known as the Hashira, a sealed tower now plagued by reports of Jinma, otherwise known as demons, appearing within. Fortunately, the Tsukuyomi possess a rather useful skill for this exact situation, the ability to turn Jinma into cards and use them to battle other Jinma, which does make them seem like a fairly sensible pick for the job.

The story follows four different Tsukuyomi as they climb the tower across different points in time, attempting to uncover what the cult occupying the structure is after and prevent the looming apocalypse, because apparently every good tower climb needs apocalyptic stakes. It’s a fun enough premise, but the storytelling is unfortunately quite disjointed. You’ll only climb a handful of floors with one Tsukuyomi before the narrative abruptly shifts to another. Once you’ve done the same with all four, the main plot advances, and then it’s wash, rinse, repeat until you eventually reach the top and whatever endgame horrors are waiting for you there.

Kazuma Kaneko’s Tsukuyomi is a deck builder and dungeon crawler, albeit not exactly a masterclass in either. It feels more like a lighter take on both genres, which makes for an initially interesting experience, but one that starts showing its cracks long before the credits roll, especially if you’re already a fan of either style.

The dungeon crawling, in particular, is a very on-rails affair. The game moves you through largely samey maps and bland environments where your only real input is deciding whether to go left or right at the occasional junction. These paths typically lead to a combat encounter, a choice event, or a shop, so there’s at least some variation in what you’re walking into, but not enough to make exploration feel particularly exciting. Don’t bother bringing a pen and paper to map things out like it’s Etrian Odyssey, because every layout more or less funnels you directly toward the floor boss. While the paths are technically randomly generated, there’s so little real surprise in them that the randomness feels mostly academic.

The choice events are actually a pretty solid addition. As you make your way through the tower, you’ll occasionally stumble across a character encounter or some strange situation that forces you to make a decision on how to proceed. Depending on what you pick, you might get a straightforward reward, take a minor setback in exchange for something better, or simply make the wrong call and get punished for your trouble. Sometimes the game is kind enough to show the outcome beneath your choices, while other times it simply asks you to put your big pants on and commit.

They’re randomly sprinkled throughout each floor and do help break up the monotony of the dungeon crawling, though the illusion doesn’t last forever. After a few runs, I started seeing the same events repeat, which meant I could begin metagaming my way toward the optimal outcome for whatever run I was on. Handy? Absolutely. But not exciting.

Combat, on the other hand, is where you’ll be spending the vast majority of your time, which is just as well, because it’s far more engaging than watching the game politely drag you through another set of samey corridors. As this is a deck builder, the real focus is on cycling through your Jinma cards, shaping your strategy, and figuring out what kind of nonsense you can get away with before the enemy reminds you that overconfidence is a slow and embarrassing killer.

Each Tsukuyomi comes with a distinct deck archetype that heavily influences how you approach combat. One might revolve around stacking status effects and gradually wearing enemies down, to the point where ignoring that strategy feels like actively sabotaging yourself. Another focuses on upgrading cards throughout battle, meaning if you fail to lean into that mechanic properly, you may as well get comfortable seeing the start of your run again. The variety between the characters does help keep things fresh, even if the game can be a little strict about how it expects you to play them.

Despite how intricate the game might seem at first glance, the core combat loop is actually fairly straightforward. You have attack cards and defence cards, and the general idea is exactly what you’d expect: hit harder than your opponent or do your best to soften the blow when they return the favour. The real depth comes from how each Tsukuyomi’s deck is structured and the mechanics tied to their specific playstyle. Unfortunately, that’s also where the game stumbles quite badly.

Because each Tsukuyomi is built around such a specific approach to combat, there’s very little room for experimentation. If you don’t play directly to their intended strengths, your chances of reaching the end of the game drop off a cliff. The cards you earn through combat or find in shops also tend to align neatly with that character’s established strategy, which means deck building often feels less like creative experimentation and more like following instructions with extra steps. If you enjoy discovering weird, broken builds through trial and error, Kazuma Kaneko’s Tsukuyomi doesn’t really leave much room for that kind of fun.

At first, this feels like a novel idea, even a fairly clever one, but after your first few beatdowns at the hands of the floor bosses, the illusion starts to crack. You begin to realise that the usual sense of freedom that makes deck builders so compelling just isn’t really here. Instead, the game often feels like it has a very specific solution in mind for each encounter, particularly bosses, making the experience feel more like solving a puzzle than experimenting with a chaotic build you’ve stitched together through instinct, luck, and questionable decision making.

That said, there are flashes of brilliance. When your chosen playstyle actually comes together, when you’ve picked up the right cards, upgraded key abilities, and your whole strategy clicks into place, the game can feel fantastic. Those moments absolutely deliver that delicious “I am operating on a higher intellectual plane” kind of energy. It just would have been nice if getting there involved a bit more freedom, experimentation, and self discovery, rather than the game repeatedly smacking you over the head until you finally arrive at the answer it wanted all along.

While we’re on the subject of defeat, each failed run awards your Tsukuyomi with EXP, allowing them to level up between attempts and unlock perks like increased starting health or stronger cards. In theory, this gives you that familiar roguelite sense of gradual progression. In practice, though, it can feel less like meaningful growth and more like the game quietly admitting you weren’t meant to win yet. There were a few floors where I took repeated losses until I’d levelled up enough to realistically stand a chance against the boss, which makes progression feel a little too close to a forced grind and, in doing so, exposes the game’s mobile origins more than it probably intended.

And then we arrive at the rather large AI generated elephant in the room. Yes, it’s a big one.

Kazuma Kaneko, a designer celebrated for some genuinely iconic artwork, made the active decision to feed his work into an AI programme to generate special cards during gameplay. The results are, frankly, rough. Some look outright terrible, and even parts of the broader art direction have that unsettling “something is off here” quality, where it feels like the artist’s usual touch just isn’t fully present. One particularly baffling example was a card I generated featuring a character smoking a cigarette… with a cigar attached to the end of it, because apparently even the AI couldn’t decide what vice it was committing to.

It’s a real shame to see one of my favourite video game artists end up here. Even if the intention was to do something novel or experimental, it simply hasn’t paid off. In a game where you’ll spend a good 80% of your time staring at cards filled with monster artwork, fumbling the visual presentation this badly is a genuinely massive misstep.

Kazuma Kaneko’s Tsukuyomi ultimately feels exactly like what it is: a mobile game port with the microtransactions stripped out and a premium price tag slapped on top. There are occasional glimpses of something genuinely clever buried in here, but they’re weighed down by gameplay that never feels nearly as deep as it initially pretends to be, and systems that still feel built around short, bite-sized sessions between train stops rather than extended time in front of a console or PC.