Beneath The Willows, a Touhou Fangame
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
CW: Brief instances of transphobia and deliberate misgendering, occasional coarse language
Sekibanki has a date coming up, and her friends insist on getting involved. Can she win an umbrella youkai's heart in spite of their meddling? And will she be able to say what needs to be said before the world forces her hand?
Beneath The Willows is a Touhou fangame made in Ren'py by the team of FionaKaenbyou and Waka. There are no branching paths, and a full playthrough should take roughly 20-30 minutes depending on reading speed. As a fangame, please keep in mind that some character portrayals may differ from the official canon.
Includes:
- Several girls, all of whom are gay
- Unconvincing disguises
- Questionable taste in literature
- A horrific pun written in icing sugar
All music and sound effects in this game are licensed for free commercial use. Please see the About page for a full list of accreditations!
Made in two weeks for the Touhou Pride Jam of 2020.
EDIT: We came second in the Jam and got ranked 1st for visuals, narrative and LGBT themes! Thanks so much to everyone who voted for us! \o/
Download
Install instructions
Extract the .zip file, place the folder and its contents on into an accessible area (use the My Documents folder if you're not sure what this means!) then open the contained exe to begin.
Development log
- Hopefully avoiding some confusionJun 22, 2020
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Dude.
Did you place Sekibanki as a Transexual?
She's a girl in the lore. A youkai, but a female. And the Grassroots as "LGBT"? They never talk about that.
In the lore the Grassroots network is to make a networking between youkai.
You messed up the true meaning of Youkai and human relationship.
Frankly, you messed up, placing some agenda instead of truly grasping the true beauty of Gensokyo and it's Youkai.
This got too real. I had to take a breathing break while playing. I'm still freaking out a bit. 11/10 game, 1000% recommend, peak fiction
This is an old game, but this almost changed my life. Thanks to all of you.
I love this! I just played it, and while I myself am fortunate enough to not have experienced discrimination based on my orientation, certain scenes managed to deliver the stress and paranoia that living in an unaccepting community can give really well, which really helped me understand what it feels like to be in that situation or in that walk of life. Overall, good art-style, love the writing, cheers to you guys!
Cool enough to blow my head off,,,XD
i lovthis anyway!
I love this game! I was having a bad day and it cheered me up! :)
I intellectualy think it was cheesy, but I teared a bit.
I can't say it's original or anything (start was slow actually and Sekibanki is maybe the only one with a bit of personality), but well, relatively speaking this type of story is totally no told enough yet, so there should be mooore cheesy stuff about non-hetero stuff with a hero/princess ! Thanks you for being one of them.
This was a really nice game, i could relate to Sekibanki with many things, it helped open my eyes/teach me a bit about LGBT stuff, thanks.
the scene that emulated having a panic attack almost gave me one 10/10
Oh gosh, I'm sorry >_<
The scene used to be a lot more upfront to the point of the character dissociating, but I decided that was too far and toned it down to the current version. Do you think it's still intense enough to add to the content warnings?
Nah you're good. I mean I knew what I was getting into. Sorry for being 3 months late lmao
I'm unable to run the game for some reason. When I try it gives and error that says file missing or access denied.
A few troubleshooting ideas:
- If you haven't unzipped/extracted the game+other contents from the zip file, you'll need to do that. I'm realising now I didn't clarify that in install instructions and have added that accordingly.
- Make sure it's on an accessable part of your computer (so not in Program Files or something)
- Occasionally antiviruses may respond to ren'py games with false positives, so you might need to list the game as an exception.
If that doesn't help I'm not sure what the problem is. I've had one other person say that the latest Windows 10 update may have dislodged something but I don't have any proven advice to offer. Sorry! >_<
First and second point aren't the issue. Third point doesn't seem to be the issue either, there are no logs about the game or any of its files in my antivirus.
Hrm. What OS are you running? And can you post an image of the exact error message?
Windows 10
"Could not execute C:\Users\(name)\Downloads\Gay jam 2\beneath-the-willows-win-linux\BeneathTheWillows-pc\lib\windows-i686\BeneathTheWillows.exe. Is it missing?"
Alright, one last batch of ideas:
Really hope one of those is enough to sort this out!
A couple of things I found from searching online:
I heard Kogasa in HanaKana voice, doing her best to scare people while looking and sounding so sweet and soft.
This game is so cute!
Hey y'all! I'm looking to download the game, but apparently there's only the mac and linux versions? I'm a windows user
Ohh nvm I'm dumb lmao
I mean, I have no idea where the windows download is, either! Where did you find it?
The first download option should run on both Windows and Linux systems. I changed the file names for both downloads so it's clearer what people need. Sorry for the confusion!