Curated by taste and lineage

A hot pot with a god of poverty, and shiritori decides the ingredients. Sometimes you must throw in something inedible just to reach the syllable you need.

You are sharing a hot pot with a god of poverty, and the way you choose what goes in it is shiritori. The store explains the loop in two moves. A single character appears, say MA. You add one character to complete an ingredient, say MAME, beans. Now the next ingredient has to begin with ME, because that is where your own word left off. You keep going, chaining ingredient to ingredient, trying to build a pot that satisfies Joon Yorigami and also satisfies whatever extra rule the round has imposed. The part that makes it a real puzzle rather than a vocabulary drill is stated plainly on the store page: you are allowed to put in things that are not food. You will probably be told off for it. But sometimes the only way to reach the character you need for the ingredient you actually want is to throw something inedible in first, and the game knows that, and lets you decide how much of a mess you are willing to make on the way to a good pot. Two things should be said before anything else. It is a Touhou Project fan work, and the store says so itself with a starred line, so the characters are borrowed rather than invented; this site has covered Touhou fan work before, and the franchise's creator permits derivative works explicitly, but you should know it going in. And there is no English of any kind. The store's own English-language page still carries a Japanese short description, Steam could not build a URL slug from the title and left an underscore, and of the 43 reviews exactly zero are in English. Made by ISY, the circle of one person who goes by Isui, whose entire catalogue of twelve Steam titles is Touhou fan work and whose developer and publisher fields are identical on all twelve; a direct check of each confirms no outside company anywhere in the record, and their off-Steam sales run through their own BOOTH shop. Released February 14, 2025 at ¥700, it is at 100 percent across 43 reviews (43 positive, zero negative), a paid title, not free, fully launched and not in Early Access, with no AI-generated-content disclosure and Steam's content descriptors completely empty. Forty-three reviews is a thin sample for a perfect score, and this pick says so rather than letting the number stand unqualified.

Published 2026-08-01

01First, the one feeling

• The moment the design lands is when you realise the ingredient you want is unreachable, because the syllable it starts with is not the one you were left with. Every good move costs you a letter, and you are always paying for the last thing you said.
• Being allowed to put in something inedible turns the pot into a ledger of your compromises. You know exactly why that one bad ingredient is in there; it was the only bridge to the thing you actually wanted to serve.
• It is a hosting game underneath. The goal is not a high score but whether the person eating with you is pleased, and a technically legal pot that nobody wants to eat is still a failure of the evening.

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

03The roots of this taste

100% positive·only 43 reviews·no English support yet — 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

• NKODICE Root
• Samui kara Nabe Kuitai ne Joon-chan to!! You are here
  • Woman Communication same root
  • Read-and-build games another taste