Rain Project is a decent Touhou fangame which could have been great if it had more polish. The main thing that makes Rain Project stand out to me in the crowd of other touhou fangames is the more somber, reflective mood of the game and soundtrack.While it's not by any means a "grimsokyo" game, Rain Project does attempt to create an atmospheric setting for its interpretation of Sanae's origin story in Gensokyo. While the nerd emoji part of me is internally complaining about a lot of the locales and npcs not being accurate to the touhou canon, I have to admit it's pretty good stuff, that's only hampered slightly by some obnoxious memey references that feel out of place. Another thing I liked in rain project is the fast and snappy movement, which feels great in both the semi-open stages and boss fights. Once you have unlocked Sanae's full moveset and the stage shortcuts, you can really zip around the game world and schmoove on bosses, which is very satisfying.

Speaking of the boss fights, they feel like a bit of a mixed bag overall. Each boss has a lot of good concepts for their attack patterns, and I like that each have several spellcards to get through, but the execution is lacking at points. Whether it be the random platforms in Aya's boss making things a crapshoot, Tenshi's broken hitboxes or Hina's position bugging out so she's impossible to hit, each boss feels like there's some major flaw which makes me not enjoy these fights as much as I should. The final boss Kanako is a massive difficulty spike and her two final patterns are a festival of RNG, but she was still my favourite of the bosses overall just because of the music and how dramatic the background changes felt. Since the boss fights are the main aspect of gameplay in Rain Project, the lack of a boss rush mode or a secret boss fight for completing all of the sidequests also feel like missed opportunities. There are a few optional bosses hidden around but they lack substance compared to the main boss fights.

As a side note, the precision platforming section in the valley was the most obnoxious part of the game. It wasn't particularly difficult, but it's one of those things where you could tell the developers put it in just because Hollow Knight and/or Celeste did it, which is just not how I think indie devs should be approaching level design.

I did enjoy my time with Rain Project enough to play through the game twice, and I am interested in checking out the second game by this dev team, but to most people I can only give Rain Project a tentative recommendation. Play it if you like Sanae and her umbrella as much as I do.