I wasn’t going to write about Mamiya. I was going to let it rot quietly in the slushpile of false prophets. But then I remembered: silence is complicity. And Mamiya is not just a failure—it is an insult to queer modernity, a slap in the face of every honest act of digital expression that has tried to mean something in this doomed, glittering age.

Mamiya is slop. Not in the fun, post-ironic, slimepunk, body-horror maximalist way. No, this is processed narrative meat, a vat-grown simulacrum of emotional depth, piped into a visual novel format with the desperate, choking hope that aesthetic fog and non-binary liminality-lite will cover up the utter artistic cowardice beneath.

This is queerbait for people who think ambiguity is politics. This is denpa drained of its teeth, genre as posture, queerness as aesthetic commodity. Every time Mamiya appears—ephemeral, empty, just there to be “symbolic”—I see the marketing deck in the background. I see the little note: Make them mysterious, genderless, but hot. Don’t commit. Don’t risk.

“Mamiya is whoever you want them to be.”
No. No they’re not.
Mamiya is nothing. Because the game refuses to give them soul. It gestures vaguely at nonbinary presence, and then does the single most boring thing possible: wraps them in trauma and lets them float, meaningless, in a sea of melodrama. This isn’t queerness. This is parasitism.

Mamiya wants the gravitas of Saya no Uta, the queered despair of Chaos;Head, and the poetic maximalism of SCA-Ji’s finest hallucinations. But it has the courage of a Netflix adaptation. It is stylistic plagiarism without philosophical investment. Empty affect. Beautiful sprites. Dialogue that dances around big themes like it's afraid they'll touch it back.

“Why do we even keep going?”
Because we’re not allowed to leave until the credits roll.

This is the exact opposite of immemory, or Monobeno, or even the fragments of ruined glory found in something like Subarashiki Hibi. Those works are dangerous. This one is sterile. It simulates collapse but never dares to collapse itself. It plays at queer death but denies queer life. It performs grief, detachment, the end of the world—all while desperately clinging to structure, clarity, and narrative safety.

You can feel the committee in the room. You can smell the drafts being scrubbed clean. There’s no risk here. No blood. No disobedience. Just theatre.

Mamiya is the kind of visual novel that could only be made by a team who think queerness is best left subtextual—a suggestion, not a scream. The kind of art that wants to profit off identity without dirtying itself with the politics of embodiment. It’s all vibes, no body. All horror, no flesh. All dissociation, no context.

This is not new modern art. It’s a hollow facsimile of relevance, a husk dressed in aesthetics looted from actual radical works. It wants to be Yume Nikki if it had plot. Denpa without teeth. Queer without consequence. And that makes it worse than bad.

It’s a betrayal.

Don’t fall for the mist and the mood. Don’t mistake opacity for depth. Queerness deserves better than this. Art deserves better than this.

And we deserve better than Mamiya.

as this and its dlc/ending are two separate entries on backloggd i’ll mark them as such. therefore none of this review takes into account the dlc— as an aside i think it’s really a bad move that the ending is something you have to buy separately lol. be warned about that if you’re thinking of playing this.

i really wish i saw in MAMIYA what other people here did. i can enjoy reading about sensitive topics like depression / suicide / abuse so i have no issues with the subject matter, but i think this was executed quite poorly. there was a lot of stilted and unclear writing that made it harder to connect with what was being told— on top of that, apparently a ton of edits were made that altered some of the writing by the time i got to play it which, upon reading the changes, i disagree with and wonder if these changes contribute to the stilted feeling (https://steamcommunity.com/app/1394930/discussions/0/4034724602261091208/). and of course it doesn’t help that the ending is sold separately, so you have a ton of questions that aren’t answered, and not even in a remember11 way where it’s fun/part of the narrative.

a lot of things were said throughout the story but rather than creating a cohesive narrative things felt abstract and like you didn’t actually know what was going on. There were a few times toward the end where the narration made emphasis on a few things and/or relationships but never said why they were so important. for example, the person behind the door in the library, before they left mamiya only spoke with them 2? 3 times? and when they left it was a really dramatic moment, and for the life of me i cant understand why. you didnt even know them bro, why are you crying about this. And this could be solved by just a couple of lines where they pointed out this discrepancy, “i didn’t even know their face but theyre the only person i talked to here”, something like that to try and rationalize it. I feel like there were a ton of scenes like that, where beefier and more clear writing would have greatly benefited whatever was going on.

i’m halfway through the dlc now so i’ll judge that on its own entry. But i feel like MAMIYA wants to be deep and is trying to be but doesn’t have good enough writing quality to stick the landing.