Review: Promise Mascot Agency
Promise Mascot Agency – the new title from Kaizen Game Works, the development team behind the incredible mystery game Paradise Killer – is a true original. After being ambushed during a money drop, a disgraced yakuza lieutenant – Michi – is sent to the cursed town of Kaso-Machi to both hide and earn back the money he lost. To make up for these lost funds, Michi needs to take over the town’s bankrupt mascot agency: a service that hires living, breathing “mascots” and sends them out to events around town.
The first mascot you meet in the town is an adorable, giant severed pinky finger (Pinky, your constant companion throughout the game). Soon you’re joined by a giant block of forever-crying tofu, a salaryman cat, a mythological thunder god, a big boiled egg, and 16 other mascots, each with different personalities and traits.These mascots need to be set up with salaries and perk packages before you send them off to work, all of which is handled through menus that you can access at any time during play. As Michi earns back the money he lost, he also begins to meet the town’s inhabitants – and to learn about the strange history of the town, which may be tied to his own past.
Promise Mascot Agency is simultaneously a game about growing and managing a successful business, and a chilled-out exploration game about driving your beat-up old van around a haunted Japanese island. It’s very much the kind of game where the more you describe it to someone, the more opaque it becomes, but the elements blend together smoothly when there’s a controller in your hand.
You’ll soon find yourself gathering up special items to make your mascots perform better, playing crane games to win prizes that you can then sell on to local businesses, and searching high and low for trash to pick up without batting an eye. Promise Mascot Agency is undeniably strange, but in ways that feel compelling and clearly thought out. There’s a particularly wild gameplay mechanic that involves collecting cards of all the game’s characters that give you advantages in a minigame that’s triggered whenever a mascot runs into strife on a job. I can’t think of another game where I’ve desperately shuffled through cards to try and figure out the best way to help a giant bat that’s gotten stuck in a doorway and wants to avoid embarrassing himself.
In fact, there’s a lot to do in Kaso-Machi, and early on finding the right balance can be tricky – for all the silliness the game bombards you with, you really do need to think about your business, and the wellbeing and happiness of your employees, with a degree of seriousness. There are workplaces I have worked at that could learn something from Promise Mascot Agency: treating your workers well, helping them with their problems, and scheduling regular salary reviews and holidays for them is the best way to grow your business. The game’s vibe is very much “forgotten PlayStation 2 title”, right down to the awesome hazy filter layered over the screen. The PS2 was a wonderful console with a specific flavour that’s hard to find in a lot of modern titles, so to play something that feels like such a throwback is exciting. But Promise Mascot Agency is also very modern in its sensibilities and politics – this is a game about outsiders banding together and finding strength from each other.
What really struck and surprised me over the 20-odd hours I spent exploring Kaso-Machi was how effectively Promise Mascot Agency operates as a story about redemption and loyalty. It imagines a version of the yakuza lifestyle dedicated to civil service and political change – protagonist Michi is a man of honour, and it’s ultimately his best and most admirable traits that see him through the game’s dramatics. It’s a funny game with a lot of charm and character, but it’s also surprisingly moving and meaningful.
Promise Mascot Agency can get repetitive, as objectives are not necessarily particularly challenging, and at a certain point I found that my business had become successful enough that I didn’t really need to worry about my incoming or outgoing expenses anymore. But I never got sick of Kaso-Michi, and the island is so littered with collectibles that a quick drive down the road always led to new discoveries. Once you unlock the glider ability for your van, which lets you fly across the island, the incentive to explore grows even stronger – jumping off a cliff, expanding your wings and hitting the boost never gets old.
There’s nothing else quite like Promise Mascot Agency. Like Paradise Killer before it, this feels like a small slice of a large world that exists in the brains of the folks who made it, a window into something weird and wonderful. I’d regularly sit down for what I thought would be a 15 minute session and lose two hours to it. It’s exactly what I’m always hoping for when I load a new game up – something truly original.
Promise Mascot Agency is available now on PS5/PS4, Xbox Series X/S/One, PC and Nintendo Switch. A PS5 copy was provided by the developer.
James O’Connor has been writing about games since 2008. He is the author of Untitled Goose Game for Boss Fight Books.
