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.

For the myriad of things that Promise Mascot Agency sets out to do, I never felt like it was overreaching or losing its sense of self. Every aspect of this game feels tailored to a curated experience that feels equally inspired and trailblazing its own direction. Everything comes together in an almost flawless symphony that I can’t help but love.

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.

Come to Kaso-Machi for the Yakuza intrigue, stay for the gang of weirdo workers in costumes you’ve actually got to treat pretty decently.

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.

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 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 chara...

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 ...

Part management sim, part open-world adventure, this is both weird and familiar, and deeply comforting stuff.

*Pinky voice* Heh.

Promise Mascot Agency's oddball, sometimes grotesque characters are actually incredibly charming, and the town of Kaso-machi is great to explore. These yakuza-managed living mascots can be messy mechanically thanks to poor balancing, but I'm won over by its truly immaculate and bizarre vibes. It's hard not to love the result, even if it could be a lot tighter.