Mamiya is described by its store page as a “captivating, dark visual novel” about young men who are struggling against existential dread before the end of the world. This game wasn’t originally on my radar because of how inscrutable that description is, but when it ended up in my inbox anyway, I decided to give its demo a go. The demo covers FallDown, Mamiya‘s first half that includes four routes corresponding to its cast of four imperiled characters, and it’s overwhelmingly dark. However, it had an undeniable pull to it; even after playing through other games, I remembered exactly what had happened in the story, and that’s when it became obvious that I had to dive into the full game and learn more about it. I’m glad that I did—Mamiya is an unexpected gem that’s dark, depressing, and often confusing, but the story comes together so well that I couldn’t stop playing.

(Hey. Mamiya has some really bad full-screen flashes. They were giving me a migraine, so I had to cover my eyes during them. Neither of the embedded videos has any flashing, so they’re safe to watch, but I figured that I’d mention this dealbreaker before praising the story.)

Mamiya is a lot of things, and I can’t help but appreciate how few of them I saw coming

The FallDown portion of Mamiya‘s story puts you in the shoes of four characters whose painful histories and secrets eventually overtake them, with their downward spirals driven largely by the intervention of a malevolent entity called Mamiya who appears and promises to help while instead leading them to suicide or murder. The first route I tried revolved around gender dysphoria and I couldn’t really relate to any of the character’s struggles. The second route I tried involved a character from the first story getting amnesia and being found by another character, with their relationship being kind of brother-brother but with a degree of closeness that made me wonder if the entire game was going to be a serious journey throughout LGBT trauma (which isn’t a negative by any means, but it’s definitely the type of thing I can’t relate to well enough to critique effectively).

That second story ended in a very unexpected way, however, and that’s when I realized that I needed to understand the identity and motivations of Mamiya and learn more about these characters.

Mamiya‘s writing style is difficult to describe, meandering through slice-of-life mundanities before something odd occurs. These strange occurrences eventually pile up, giving the more upbeat “normal” parts of the storytelling a shadowy, wrong-feeling counterpart that leaves you feeling like someone’s stuck their fingers through your eye sockets and started tickling your brain. You never know which side of Mamiya you’re going to get. It’s funny but also melodramatic. It’s upbeat and lighthearted but also overwhelmingly dark and prone to delving into sensitive subjects. You never know which hand it’ll strike you with.

And while very little seems important during the FallDown part of the game, all sorts of little details pay off in the latter half. I can say very little about the second half of the game without potentially spoiling all sorts of things, but suffice it to say that you take control of a fifth character, a player stand-in of sorts, who’s determined to save the four characters who fell victim to Mamiya through some supernatural shenanigans. The tone shifts slightly during the second half of the game, appropriately titled DownFall, as new characters appear and both the darkness and humor intensify.

Mamiya is a game about many things, but more than anything, it’s about how the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It’s also about kicking your legs out from under you; it’s been a while since a game caught me quite this off-guard. I mean, I’ve covered hundreds of games and become familiar enough with how most developers write their plots that few twists surprise me anymore, but Mamiya consistently delivered twists that recontextualized earlier events in a deeply satisfying way. Even better, it only half-explains the best of these, leaving you frantically replaying earlier events to better understand what just happened. You’ll have to replay the second half several times to understand the more fascinating connections.

I found that the best way of playing is to speed read each line as fast as possible, stopping and taking a look at the log of recent lines whenever something sticks out. Many lines are on the shorter side, so going as fast as possible lends the dialog as a whole a kind of staccato quality. It also blurs many of the lines together, which further emphasizes the dreamlike quality that pervades much of the story.

There are a handful of choices to make (which usually determine which character you’ll follow) and “endings” to acquire, but all endings save for the true ending are incomplete, unfulfilling dead ends.

Even the true ending doesn’t explain everything, giving you enough information to piece together a vague understanding of Mamiya’s history and goals and why everything occurs the way it does, but leaving a couple of dangling plot threads and some of the supernatural worldbuilding for a future sequel to address. That’s a strange decision—especially given that finishing the game unlocks a free gacha-styled random drawing of non-canonical side stories (many of which are admittedly amusing) that can require around three weeks to unlock fully thanks to a limit to the number you can draw per day and the fact that you can and will draw stories you already have multiple times—but there’s no denying that Mamiya wrapped its tendrils around me. I certainly wouldn’t mind another game that follows up on this game’s events while fleshing out the rules, limitations, and hierarchy of some of its more supernatural elements.

The soundtrack here is an eclectic mix of styles with a habit of stealing the scene

Mamiya‘s visuals are every bit as strange as its storytelling. Early on, they appear low-effort, with the textured, blurred backgrounds suggesting that not much work was put into the visual side of things. Then you get an unexpected video or one of many high-quality illustrations that emphasize the underlying emotions of important scenes and realize that an unusual amount of work was put into the visual side of the game. However, those full-screen white and red flashes are a serious pain on the eyes, and Mamiya has some odd performance problems at higher resolutions. For some reason, this game runs flawlessly on my ~7-year-old laptop and at around 15 FPS (at best) on my gaming computer. Playing full-screen at 4K can cause freezes when 4-5 characters are on screen together. Windowed mode helps slightly, though performance degrades over time even when you go that route. The odd thing is that the art isn’t 4K. Only the text is sharp at that resolution, so you’re losing a lot of performance for a simple stretch.

I can’t praise Mamiya‘s unusual soundtrack enough. The ominous piano track that plays on the main menu is a great precursor to a soundtrack filled with keepers, from manic classical numbers to dreamy vocal tracks. I embedded a video of one track that knocked my socks right off, which centers its unusual mix of instruments with a bandpassed, reverb-less vocal track of a woman talking softly. It sounds like someone having a crisis over the telephone, except you can only barely hear the specific things she’s saying because the music is turned up too loud. It’s glorious. I love weird songs like this so much, and these weirder types of tracks ratchet up your involvement and inject additional drama into any scene they appear in.

Story: 5/6 Gameplay: N/A Visuals: 1/2 Music: 2/2 ★★★★★★★★☆☆ – 8/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*A Steam key was provided for this Mamiya review. I don’t know how long it is. I ignored two routes because I went through them in the demo and still played for 13 hours, but I also replayed some parts.

MAMIYA review – Addictive depression first appeared on Killa Penguin