Sweet Hamster Days is mentioned as a game of a never-before-seen genre where virtual characters care about you as much as you care about them. And one Japanese politician warns that it will reduce the birth rate of the nation! I had to research what it was all about.
We’ve been wanting to bring back the trash reviews section for a while now, just for fun. For those who haven’t been on HCL for a long time, we used to do trash reviews for specific video games that were once completely amateurish or intentionally bad. Before, we had to look for such games, and today about fifty of them are released on Steam – every day. But it’s not very professional of us to purposely mock bad games and make fun of them, so the return of trash reviews hangs in the air. If we ever get them back – it will be without grades.
And then the day before yesterday, I was browsing what’s new on Steam, when there you have the ideal candidate for revitalizing a thrash review! A game where you are a hamster and you feed three women. As soon as I saw that Sweet Hamster Days has a demo version – I didn’t hesitate for a moment to install it!
I have to point this out right away so there’s no problem later – this is one of those 18+ games you won’t see on Steam unless you have that explicit filter on. It is obvious to me – I betrayed myself with this. But my interest in these games is, of course, purely from an academic perspective. A person needs to try all kinds of things to be complete as a reviewer!
My interest in the game grew even more when I heard that a lot of dust had been raised around it. Her first launch on Steam was rejected, but that somehow got ironed out in the end. And then, according to the developers, a Japanese politician played a demo version of Sweet Hamster Days and then declared that Japan’s birthrate will continue to decline if we allow such dangerous games.
That’s where they got me – I just had to try that dangerous game where you’re a hamster fed by three sisters!
The story goes that a guy named Kota Kurono has three hot wives in the neighborhood, the Shiratori sisters, and the poor guy can’t decide which one to marry (and all three are willing). When tragedy comes to your door – Kota was killed in a traffic accident, and he was young… However, this is not the end of his story, but only the beginning, because he is reincarnated as a hamster. And look at the silly fates, he becomes a hamster right at the Shiratori sisters! And they call him Hamta, just as they called him when he was alive!
Sisters Himari, Futaba and Miyu are left without husbands and need some support. And they find it at a totally unexpected source, because Kota from the afterlife, like a hamster, has to watch over and guide them. Although he is a hamster who can only squeal to distract his owners, Kota has the superhero power of rewinding time when bad things happen to women. And ultimately, his goal is to use this power to lead his wife on the right path. Who knows – maybe in the end he will end up at the altar with them? I don’t know because I only played 28 minutes of the demo version.
Sweet Hamster Days is your FMV type of adventure where you usually have 1-2 decisions and then that’s how you move the action forward. I immediately took a liking to Futaba, so I whined and helped her master putting on pantyhose. And when Futaba was practicing yoga, I let her stretch a little too long and the poor thing fell and hurt her ankle! That’s also where I stopped playing because I simply didn’t have the heart to watch that suffering.
You will probably ask me – where are the simple screenshots from Sweet Hamster Days? Maybe you won’t believe me, but in the demo version everything was quite innocent and chaste, I guess because it’s the beginning of the game. Himari, Futaba and Miya know what they are doing, and they like to pretend that they are not aware that the hamster is watching them… But don’t expect nudity – it doesn’t seem like that kind of game!
So is it fun to be a hamster that women kiss, caress and put on their laps? Whatever! It’s not like you have any significant control over the character or the camera. There is some branching of the story, but the story is as silly as it seems right away in the plot. In addition, the flow of the plot is initially confusing. And the acting is forced, even those FMV shots could have been more fluid.
All in all, I was disappointed with Sweet Hamster Days, and I was expecting at least an enviable level of shame. But the game has clearly broken the ice, so we will inevitably get more things like this where instead of a hamster we will be some other animal. For example, Jimothy the raccoon. Watch what I tell you!