Hands-on with what we can only hope is the strangest management sim of 2025.
It’s hard to believe Promise Mascot Agency’s developers believe in the words “too far.” A few minutes into the game I met my new assistant at the agency I have to return to profit, which exclusively employs weirdos and rejects. Pinky is a child-height severed finger with a hair trigger for flying into a rage. Half an hour later the first mascot I run into in the nearby town and recruit to my agency is a cat covered in cum (sorry, “Japanese yam”). He loves porn.
And yet Kaizen Game Works insists they have, in fact, shown some restraint.
“That was worse. We toned that down”, laughed art director Rachel Noy in a recent interview. “That had a certain name that I don’t really feel comfortable repeating.”
Like Kaizen’s first game Paradise Killer, Promise Mascot Agency throws wild characters in your face with devil-may-care glee. But where that wonderful 2020 detective game had an anything-goes attitude with its coterie of immortal gods, this one is more rooted in Japanese pop culture, which their British creators credit to their collaboration with Capcom and Tango Gameworks veteran Ikumi Nakamura and her concept artist. They pitched the rough idea for the game to Nakamura—a disgraced Yakuza managing a team of living mascots—and then the designs started flowing in, one after another.
Bizarre designs. For a lot of them, they just “had to take the edge off a bit”, Noy added.
“There wasn’t anything obscene or too graphic”, reassured director Oli Clarke Smith. “But [cat mascot] Trororo’s original name, from Ikumi, that would’ve hit the age ratings… badly.”
Emboldened by Nakamura’s designs, the team leaned into the idea of the world itself being less fantastical than Paradise Killer’s magical island. The characters within it being off-kilter only serves to highlight their weirdness and the comic side of the game, which enriches what could otherwise be a menu-heavy management game. Once I’d recruited a couple mascots I got to work assigning them jobs that best suited their characteristics (funny, cute, safety-minded). Early on it’s simple, but later you’ll have to keep an eye on your finances and also ensure your mascots and the recruitable heroes you send in to aid them are leveling up their stats to complete harder jobs and keep the cash flowing.
Minigames give you the opportunity to play cards in a quick, stripped down deckbuilder.
