Curated by taste and lineage

Sakamoto Ryoma is brokering the alliance that will topple the shogunate when a wormhole drops everyone into 'Fluffy Land', so he stops time, teleports out of the barrage, and absorbs the bullets that were about to kill him.

A top-down bullet-hell shooter made and self-published by Retsu Teikoku, a game-making circle led by a creator going by Retsu, which Famitsu and AUTOMATON's Japanese edition both describe in exactly those terms; per a developer interview it is a two-person team, a programmer and a planner, working in C++ with DX Library, a Japanese-made library documented only in Japanese. Per Steam's own listing, Sakamoto Ryoma has brokered a meeting between the Satsuma and Choshu domains to bring down the shogunate, and then, mid-alliance, a wormhole opens and everyone present is flung into 'Fluffy Land'; your job is to find the scattered historical figures and get the alliance signed anyway. Ryoma has the power to stop time and teleport, which, as the store text notes in passing, is not in the textbooks. When a barrage looks unavoidable, freeze it and blink somewhere safe, and while time is stopped, brushing bullets with your cursor powers up Ryoma's gun, absorbing the energy of what was about to kill you and handing it back as an attack. The supporting cast is the same joke played straight: Saigo Takamori can also stop time and is fairly sure the wormhole was Choshu's fault; Shibusawa Eiichi, described simply as the man who recently became the ten-thousand-yen note, got swept in while investigating the alliance from the shogunate's side; and Matthew Perry, who arrived on the black ships, has nothing to do with any of it and is now busy demanding that Fluffy Land open its borders. Ryoma himself never speaks at all. The circle's earlier Lotion samurai, a slapstick time-attack game in which a body-modified Nobunaga oozes lotion and can only move by kicking off walls to slide, sits at 98.4 percent over 122 reviews, and every title including its Switch release has been self-published with no external publisher at any stage. Released June 18, 2025 at ¥350, it is Positive at 100 percent over 24 reviews (24 positive, 0 negative), a paid title, not free, fully launched and not in Early Access, with no AI-generated assets and no Mature Content box at all, and per Steam's own content descriptors, nothing sexual. It supports English, Simplified Chinese, and Korean alongside Japanese, yet 18 of its 24 reviews are in Japanese against 6 in English and none at all in Chinese or Korean; a dedicated check of AUTOMATON WEST, Siliconera, Kotaku, PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, Destructoid, and GameSpot turned up no editorial coverage, only auto-generated database listings. With 24 reviews the sample is still thin, and this pick says so plainly.

Published 2026-07-27

01First, the one feeling

• Per Steam's own text, the freeze is not a panic button but the actual reading room: a wall of bullets that means nothing at full speed becomes a legible shape the moment Ryoma stops the clock, and only then do you get to decide where to be.
• Brushing bullets with your cursor during the freeze converts them into your own firepower, so the thing you were fleeing a second ago is the thing you are now spending, and greed and survival end up pulling on exactly the same input.
• The whole premise is a school textbook with a wormhole punched through it, Ryoma silent throughout, Saigo blaming Choshu for the wormhole, Perry still demanding a country open its borders, and playing it straight-faced is what makes the joke land instead of collapse.

02Who this is for (and who it is not)

03The roots of this taste

100% positive·only 24 reviews — yet almost no one has found it

04Make this gem shine

If it speaks to you, check it on Steam and give it your first pass. Your push is what makes a buried gem shine.

05The bloodline of this taste

• SUPERHOT Root
• Sakamoto Dangerous Barrage You are here
  • Million Depth same root
  • Read-and-build games another taste