‘Promise Mascot Agency’ Review: An Esoteric, If Aimless, Japanese Business Sim

With Paradise Killer, indie developer Kaizen Game Works made waves with the electrifying stylistic brio that they brought to bear on the project. The game’s vision of a vaporwave afterlife—an occult cityscape full of trinkets to collect and clues to follow—is confident and transportive. Now, with Promise Mascot Agency, Kaizen doubles down on the open-world collectibles and tangential mechanics, and hardly for the better, as the glut of shallow time-sinks too often eclipses the developer’s clear talent for esoteric world-building.

Yakuza cleaner Michi has been exiled to the dead-end Japanese town of Kaso-Machi, with the hope that he’ll be able to lift a mascot agency out of bankruptcy. From the pause menu, you assign workers to jobs in need of their promotional services, pulling from a roster of recruited mascots. The proceeds are meant to go back home to pay off some hefty yakuza debts, but entrepreneurship is never so simple. Not only do you need to take care of the agency’s overhead and leave a cut for the workers, but you also need to pump money back into Kaso-Machi’s economy. After all, a booming tourist town means more opportunities for your workforce.

If that sounds like a distressingly conventional follow-up to Paradise Killer, I’m happy to point out that the game’s mascots here aren’t regular humans holed up inside sweat-laden costumes; they’re a separate race of sentient beings that encompasses bulbous cartoon birds, crying blocks of tofu, and other oddities. Pinky, another mascot and Michi’s business partner, is a giant, disembodied finger with eyes, a mouth, and nubby little limbs. She’s so large that she has to sit in the bed of Michi’s rickety pickup as you drive around Kaso-Machi and its surrounding countryside, running errands and finding collectibles while recruiting new workers.

The odd coupling of Pinky and Michi is emblematic of the often poetic goofiness that goes into Promise Mascot Agency’s characterizations: The disgraced Michi cut off his little finger in a penance ritual, and the partner who “completes” him is quite literally a pinky finger. The rest of the game’s motley mascot crew is just as pleasantly bizarre, ranging from a talking burial mound to a ghost who can only communicate by conjuring images in a person’s mind.

Plenty of considered design choices have gone into bringing Kaso-Machi to life, from the lovely stamp card you fill in by visiting new locations to the bespoke signage for each new business that opens. Which makes it a shame that there’s scant complexity to the practice of running the mascot agency, which is the meat and potatoes of the gaming experience.

Technically, there are a lot of variables to pay attention to: contract negotiations, mandated time off, pay percentages, stamina, and more. Once out on a job, mascots are unavailable until work is finished, and they might get into trouble that requires you to step in and play a card-based minigame to determine whether the job succeeds or fails. But it all ends up being of minimal consequence, as you’re never forced to think through your choices and make compromises. All you’re doing is matching up mascots with the highest-paying gigs that call for their particular skill sets and reaping the benefits. Jobs never expire, and mascots never quit.

Stats like happiness and motivation affect the card minigame’s difficulty, so a more seasoned worker is ostensibly a safer bet for the more challenging, higher-paying jobs. But in practice, the card battle is so easy to win that there’s no reason to be choosey about who you assign. Late-game additions like contracting mascots in distant cities or managing merchandise deliveries are equally shallow. It’s as if Promise Mascot Agency is actively recoiling from anything complex enough to take players out of the open-world driving for more than a minute or two.

Of course, it’s not as if trucking around Kaso-Machi is so much more gratifying across Promise Mascot Agency. The driving mechanics are purely functional, a means of scooping up collectibles while traveling from the dialogue boxes at point A to the dialogue boxes at point B. Paradise Killer was also packed with collectibles, but its central mystery gave the player’s actions a sense of purpose and involvement, letting you stumble upon clues while following leads in any order you wanted. Promise Mascot Agency is aimless by comparison, a linear story happening around the edges of a business sim that comes dangerously close to playing itself.

This game was reviewed with a code provided by Neonhive.