You could say that Hakomari is a mix between 'chessgame' type fiction like No Game No Life, Kaiji and Akagi, Yasutaka Tsuisui and Dostoyevsky-lite (or Kokoro Connect). The light novel works on two levels, the first being the highly satisfactory intellectual level of how the games and betrayals pile up on top of one another, and the second being the extremely brutally pessimistic worldview of Eiji Mikage. Most characters contain deep psychological traumas derived from the worst part of humanity. The main failure of most other chessgame fiction is the lack of characterization and an overt focus on the games themselves. What made Kaiji great was that it had biting social critique and it actually bothered to characterize exactly how powerless a person is at the bottom of the Japanese societal class structure and how dog-eat-dog the world was.

The thing about Hakomari is that while the psychological traumas are very brutally expounded upon, they seem to derive from incessantly small miserable human exploits. This is where the Tsuisui connection comes in. Much of the plot of Hakomari involves petty human unrequited loves, domestic violence, jealousy, anger and arrogance blowing up into apocalyptic levels due to the interference of supernatural forces. Bullying and the chain effect of evil is an especially prevalent theme across, but especially at the later arcs when more ground-shaking revelations are thrown out at everyone. In fact he even uses the latest arc to commentate on this by showing every human, even the most normal, being full of pent-up dirty emotions and despicable shames. Mikage's world is a world of whores, misanthropists and broken souls.

As a light-novel the plot is extremely satisfying and tragic and, although entertaining and emotional, doesn't quite go the far stretch at portraying the human soul as stuff like NGE and Tsuisui's books actually do. It's just a very tightly written story with enough twists and turns and dramatic outcries to get your heart pumping. Its also written (or rather translated) into a very readable and economic style which sets up the rules of the games in a precise manner and then shows the outcome. It also mixes up a lot of styles and narrative methods to vary up the types of games. On a technical level Mikage writes a lot like the highly psychological works of Looseboy like G Senjou no Maou and Sharin no Kuni.