The demo for Kaizen’s Promise Mascot Agency throws a lot of ideas you, but at its heart, it’s just a game about being a good boss.
Stripped back, it’s part open world driving game, part business management. You pull up in the cursed town of Kaso-Machi, a broke yakuza with a sentient severed digit hanging out in the back of your grimy pickup truck.
You’re here to make scratch helping the locals, so you’ll need to recruit mascot creatures to hire out for jobs. They’re a hopeless bunch, possessing all the neurotic animism you’d expect from distinctly 21st century yōkai. You’re soon negotiating salaries and benefits with a giant block of perpetually weeping tofu. Then, enlisting the help of a traffic safety superhero to help out when jobs go south.
The tofu gets stuck in a door on their first job. To help out on the next, I pack them a lunch comprising a wilted hamburger from a vending machine. The tutorial missions dry up, so I open the map. It takes a moment to realise what I’m looking at. Or, rather, what I’m not.
Not a nagging map marker in sight, despite a menu telling me there are several tasks available. Promise Mascot Agency will only mark the activities available on your map if you explicity tell it to. You ask Pinky for hint, and choose the type of activity you fancy, whether that’s recruiting new mascots, finding new jobs, or hiring more heroes. Once you ask – and only then – the game adds a pin showing where to find that type of task.
This is – if I’m using my academic ludology terms correctly – the good shit. An adrenaline shot for decision paralysis. A Marie Kondolance for our era’s inescapable hellscape of cluttered landscapes. I have stared deep into the skittish eyes of the chattering mind monkey and sealed his lips together with Gorilla Glue, but not before heightmogging him with the gorilla on the label. Thank you, Promise Mascot Agency.
There’s plenty more to love here. The town is run down and dusky, but the landscape flows in such a way that you can see the streetlights shoal together from a distance. Driving in from the outskirts feels like it does when you catch a taxi in from an airport; the rising swell of life and lights and noise despite a ghostly ambience. Dreamy, dark pop slows to a warped cassette crawl when you pause. I collect floating coins that each tell tiny stories with their confirmation pop ups. A wallet containing a shopping list with nothing crossed off. A thousand yen note used a bookmark. When I crash the car my DualSense speaker starts yelling a cartoonish, clattering racket at me.
A pack of ghostly foxes escape from a mechanic’s garage while I’m chatting to him. I chase them for truck upgrades. The first gives me a cannon that lets me shoot Pinky at the remaining foxes. You can’t leave your truck, which is tiny bit awkward in certain spots, but you can bunny hop and boost over difficult terrain. Your truck is invulnerable and I wholly believe the game wants you to drive like an idiot.
I think the tofu crying all the time is a reference to how irritating it is to drain tofu so you can grill it properly, although its mainly used here to humiliate the poor creature. Alongside the exploration, social, and management aspects, the other part of Promise Mascot Agency is card battles that take place when your mascots run into trouble on their jobs. They look like this:
The demo is unfortunately timed, and I didn’t get much of a chance to see how much depth the card game has, but the basic idea is that you use the cards of the heroes you’ve recruited to damage whatever obstacle you’re up against like a boss battle. Run out of actions before you win, and you lose. It’s perhaps the game’s weakest aspect but again, I barely scratched the surface. Still, what’s here is just as beautifully odd and oddly beautiful as you’d expect from Kaizen. It’s due out this year, and I will make that tofu smile if it kills me.