Alfa System's 2005 arcade bullet hell Castle of Shikigami III could be coming to Steam later this year, thanks to a new crowdfunding campaign that launched at the end of last month in Japan on the website Camp-fire.jp.
Castle of Shikigami III originally debuted in the arcades back in the mid-2000s and was later ported to PC, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii, with the Wii release coming to North America via Aksys Games in 2008.
Now the company Cosmo Machia (who was also recently behind the Triggerheart Exelica rerelease) is planning to bring it to Steam and is aiming to release it in December 2024, should it hit its goal.
The company wants ¥3,000,000 to make the project a reality and is currently on ¥2,058,100 as of the time of writing, with the campaign set to come to an end on August 31st.
It is offering a downloadable copy of the Steam game for ¥6,000 as part of the crowdfunding campaign, with a bunch of higher tiers also available to back featuring rewards like the game's official soundtrack on CD, a fan book, a rubber desktop mat, a drinks tumbler, and more.
Cosmo Machia previously brought Castle of Shikigami to Steam in 2017 and did the same for its sequel Castle of Shikigami II in 2021. The second game was also later released worldwide on Switch in 2023. The goal with this project seems to be to finish bringing all three games to Steam so that people can experience these bullet hell shooters all in one place, but there are also stretch goals to bring the game to home consoles (if the campaign reaches ¥15,000,000) and to also port the first game over as well (¥20,000,000).