Promise Mascot Agency

A seamless meeting of real-time microeconomics, absurdist humor, amazing character work, and a thrilling mystery lands Promise Mascot Agency among my favorite games of all time.

The least amicable city council meeting you've ever attended and probably the best game you'll play this year.

Driving around a spooky and mysterious Japanese town in a souped-out Kei truck is a surprising amount of fun. The business management is simple but deep enough to keep players engaged, and the gripping, mysterious story of the town will keep you engaged from start to finish.

Promise Mascot Agency's Kaso-Machi is an unforgettable setting packed with mysteries, mascots, and chaos. It somehow crams together almost any genre you might care to mention, from management sim to open-world RPG, and it does it all with style and heart.

Promise Mascot Agency blends driving, money management and talking blocks of tofu to create a gleefully weird game that demands your attention.

Promise Mascot Agency is a weird, flawed experience. You spend most of your time driving around this tiny town, chatting up a series of total weirdos. You’ve got a short list of tasks to complete, a lot of money to make, and a lot of fires to put out. But all of it is so engaging, so charming and fun, that you don’t mind one bit. This town is a complete, well-crafted world full of compelling characters and fascinating stories. Plus, the core gameplay loop is addictive and butter-smooth. I don’t know exactly how to recommend this game, but I can’t recommend it enough.

What if mascots were real, living beings? What if you could hire them for promotional events? What if a giant block of tofu had crippling anxiety? Promise Mascot Agency, the new title from Kaizen Game Works, is the only game brave enough to answer these questions. It’s a strange blend of management sim, open-world exploration, visual novel, crime drama, and “The Simpsons: Hit & Run”-esque driving adventure. That combination might sound baffling on paper, but once you hop into the driver...

Promise Mascot Agency is one of the most interesting games you're likely unaware of. It's got a lot of heart, incredible characters, and tons of fantastic stories.

How far will you go to help your family? Would you lend them some money? Help them to build a business to secure their future? Get exiled to a cursed town to turnaround a failing business while slowly dying? If you chose the last option, then you may have to check you have not transformed into Michi, the main character of weird and thoroughly charming Promise Mascot Agency.

*Pinky voice* Heh.

Explore the cursed town of Kaso-Machi! Recruit and train mascot friends! Help out when jobs go wrong! Solve the mystery of your exile! Help Pinky work through her many anger issues! Turn Promise Mascot Agency into the best agency in Japan! Go go, Michi and Pinky! PC version reviewed.

Promise Mascot Agency excels in precisely the areas you'd expect from the folks behind Paradise Killer – it's a phenomenal aesthetic piece and a genuinely gripping, off-kilter crime drama. The management gameplay at its core proves to be a bit surface level, sometimes even intrusive, but there’s an undercurrent of beautiful weirdness here that makes even the iffiest contracts worth signing.