Sweet Hamster Days: Kodansha’s Live-Action Hamster Sim Launches After Steam Ban U-Turn
Kodansha’s oddest gaming experiment yet is finally live. Sweet Hamster Days, a full-motion-video “romance sim” that casts the player as a hamster reincarnated into the care of three sisters, launched for PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store on July 17, following a chaotic year that saw the title pulled from sale entirely before its original 2025 window.
According to Kodansha’s own launch announcement, the game follows Kota Kurono, a young man who returns to his hometown after six years away, only to be hit by a car and wake up reincarnated as the pet hamster of his childhood friends, the Shiratori sisters. A young man who returned to his hometown for the first time in 6 years reunited with Futaba, got into a traffic accident and reincarnated as the Shiratori family’s hamster, earning the nickname “Hamuta.” The whole story is told in 4K live-action footage from the hamster’s low, scampering point of view.
Three Sisters, One Confused Hamster
The cast is built around gravure idols rather than trained actresses, a deliberate choice given the project’s origins. The live-action cast includes Sayaka Tomaru as the older sister Himari Shiratori, Momoha Takatsuru as the middle sister Futaba Shiratori, and Shiori Ikemoto as the younger sister Miu Shiratori. Kodansha’s character breakdown paints Himari as a hard-working consultant who dotes on the hamster at home, Futaba as a ballet-trained university student currently job-hunting, and Miyu as the household’s sharp-tongued youngest sibling.
The story itself was written by a familiar name in Japanese games. The scenario was written by Ken Shimomura, who previously worked on Chain Chronicle and Onmyoji. Kodansha has framed the whole project as a crossover between publishing and games, built around its gravure magazine FRIDAY and its in-house Kodansha Game Creators Lab.
Why Sweet Hamster Days Vanished From Steam Before It Ever Launched
Sweet Hamster Days wasn’t supposed to take this long to reach players. As PC Gamer reported, the developer posted on X in late 2025 that Sweet Hamster Days was pulled from Steam “due to various circumstances” before its original release window of winter 2025, and it wasn’t immediately clear why the storefront removed the listing. The game quietly reappeared on Steam months later carrying an adult-content warning, a rarity for the still-niche FMV genre.
Speaking to AUTOMATON WEST after launch, Kodansha’s own developers addressed the saga directly. Producer Sakurai downplayed how explicit the finished game actually is compared to its source material, noting “there are certainly moments in there that ‘make your heart race,’ but by FRIDAY (Kodansha’s gravure magazine that participated in development)’s own standards, the content in Sweet Hamster Days is actually quite restrained.” A colleague on the team, Oda, added that internally the game was never treated as adult content by Japanese standards, even if Valve classified it differently.
Kodansha Wants Live-Action Games to Become a Real Japanese Genre
Beyond the controversy, the interview reveals a publisher with bigger ambitions for the format. Sakurai told AUTOMATON that he’d find it exciting if live-action games became established in Japan as a legitimate form of expression other companies could explore, arguing that expanding the use of live footage can broaden the possibilities of the medium, as seen in serious titles like Her Story. The team even referenced Kodansha’s plan for a July 18 event focused on live-action games held together with TV Asahi.
Katayama, another Kodansha Game Lab staffer, went further on the artistic side, comparing the production’s visual language to a legendary Japanese filmmaker. Sweet Hamster Days frequently uses low-angle shots, which reminded Katayama of the dignified style of Yasujirō Ozu’s cinematography — an unusual reference point for a game built around gravure photography and pet-hamster fan service, and one Katayama himself acknowledged was an odd fit given “the contents of our game are quite… different.”
Critics Find Real Character Drama Under the Fan Service
Early reviews have largely agreed the game is more sincere than its premise suggests. Noisy Pixel’s write-up concluded that Sweet Hamster Days turns an absurd hamster isekai premise into a surprisingly heartfelt visual novel with likable heroines, thoughtful character arcs, and strong voice performances, even if its lack of quality-of-life features and barebones interaction hold it back. The outlet singled out the missing fast-forward and scene-navigation options as the game’s clearest technical shortcoming, alongside dialogue choices that mostly don’t affect the outcome.
Sweet Hamster Days is currently priced at 1,800 JPY on Steam with a 10 percent launch discount running until July 30, per Kodansha’s own release notes, and supports English, Japanese, and both Traditional and Simplified Chinese subtitles. There’s no dedicated Australian or New Zealand storefront pricing confirmed yet, but the Steam and Epic Games Store listings are globally accessible with full English text support, meaning local FMV and visual novel fans can pick it up alongside the rest of the world.
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