As Promise Mascot Agency nears the end of its costumed run through the explosions of development, its devs are feeling good about handing their “band of freaks” over to you
“I think it’s difficult to convey what the game is,” Oli Clarke Smith, director of Promise Mascot Agency, tells me.
“That’s the thing that we’ve noticed and struggled with. We initially talked about the game – well, we still do – as an open-world mascot management crime drama, and to us that made perfect sense, but I don’t think that has conveyed quite what the game is.
“It’s a full open-world RPG with management aspects and creature collector aspects – and when people have got it, they’ve really clicked with it and understood it.” The good thing that the team at Paradise Killer studio Kaizen Game Works have found as they’ve grappled with gradually unveiling more and more about their 2025 release is this – early audience reviews of their “band of freaks” have been “universally good”.
This gang of weirdos is the game’s mascots – the sentient burial mounds, cats who’re really against adult video pixelation, and little guys like Mottsun, who just looks like the greatest thing of all-time – that you’ll be managing the mascotting of when you play Promise Mascot Agency. Most of them were designed in collaboration between Kaizen’s small British team – Clarke Smith, technical director Phil Crabtree, and art director Rachel Noy – and the Japanese duo of famed former Tango Gameworks artist Ikumi Nakamura and Mai Mattori.
“We went to her with absolutely nothing,” Clarke Smith explains, “because we’d just finished our previous game. We’d got the rough concept [for Promise Mascot Agency], and it was important for us to work with someone in Japan, being a Western team and setting a game in Japan. The mascots we got back were things that we would never have made ourselves and cultural references that we wouldn’t have got to ourselves.”
While Kaizen’s devs are keen for their games to feel uniquely Kaizen, their approach to working with Nakamura and other collaborators has always been “here’s a rough idea of what we want, please put your own spin on it”. “It means that we get all of these lived experiences from other people coming into the game,” the director says, citing the example of Nakamura telling them about visiting a bar on the real-life coast of Kyushu in southwestern Japan, where PMA’s setting is based on.
No one in said establishment wanted to speak to Nakamura due to her being an “outsider” to the area, and in telling stories like this, the artist gave Kaizen things they could draw on for the look and atmosphere of their town, Kaso-Machi. Naturally, there were also bits of their own lives in the UK that the team could bring to the story, with Noy relating that you can get at least a little bit of a similar feeling of being an outsider in a far-flung town if, for example, you walk into a pub in Cornwall while on holiday. “Also, we watched a lot of Twin Peaks, she adds, “that was a big, big reference and another reason we wanted to get Swery involved.”
There were some tweaks made along the way and not everything translated – for example, Nakamura and Mattori’s mascot designs had to be made to fit a relatively similar size and shape so that animations would “work across mascots”. But, Clarke Smith says, it was often a case of “that doesn’t quite fit the structure of the game, but 90% of it does, so we can put it in”.
In putting together the game that’d feature all of those designs and themes, Kaizen faced a different task than it had when making its first game. “With Paradise Killer, Phil and I were the only employees at the time, so it was kind of us two just working out how to make a video game together,” the director explains, “It was a big conceptual change, going from mystery game to a management game, but in terms of our process and how we made the game, it felt much easier [this time].” He adds that it’s still been “the hardest game” he’s ever worked on to make, but things like the way the team communicates have naturally evolved to become something that just clicks without as much conscious effort.
“It helps that some of the systems we’ve got are carried over from Paradise Killer,” Crabtree adds, “So, in terms of ‘Okay, we need this sort of system’, a lot of the coding’s already done. It’ll obviously need a bit of twisting and pulling, but it meant there was a bit more time for the design.” He goes on to reveal that early on, the team went a lot more in-depth in terms of the management aspect of Promise Mascot Agency, creating a full calendar-style system in which you’d be juggling assignments across days and weeks.
“This big, overly complex management stuff didn’t really sit well with the chill world, bringing life back to the world and interacting with the characters,” the technical director says, “So, we’ve had to push and pull a little bit, but I’m really happy with where we’ve got to on it, because the management sits there in the background and in some ways it’s quite simple, but what’s lying underneath is quite complex. You have to keep an eye on it, but it’s not overwhelming.”
As you manage your mascots by sending them on jobs, they’ll run into issues that put them in danger of not being able to do the thing you’ve sent them off to do. These hazards, ranging from doors, to playful dogs, and normally-sized doors, came from what Crabtree wonderfully describes as “a big old list of stupid things that could happen”, which the team came up with after doing some YouTube research on mascot fails. Clarke Smith cites the iconic viral Japanese TV clip that is mascot Funassyi running away from a series of explosions as one, however, the team needed to make sure what they went with wouldn’t be too tough to script and put together, as well as having an obvious “bail resolution” – the bit where you step in and try to help.
All of this, and the rest of the game around it, evolved from art director Noy’s original idea of a mascot management sim in the style of games like Kairosoft’s Game Dev Story. “We wanted to do something bigger and we were concerned from a business point of view about making a small-scale 2D simulation management game,” Clarke Smith explains, “Like, would that keep the company going?”
Along the way to what PMA is now, other features ended up being rejigged or ditched due to not meshing with what the vision evolved into. There were once loans you could take out and checkpoint races you’d be able to do with Michi and Pinky in their cool little kei-truck. “We never brought it up to a full feature,” Clarke Smith says of the latter, “because when you think about an open world, that’s what every open world game does. We felt at a certain point we should put this in because we might need more gameplay, and then we realized that we didn’t.”
They’re still sitting there in the background, also existing because in Noy’s words, the team liked the idea of “cool drift cars going down a mountain in Japan”, likely to only be dusted off if Kaizen ends up being offered the chance to do something like an Initial D tie-in DLC.
Before Kaizen can think about anything like that, though, they’ll need to see how Promise Mascot Agency’s release later this year goes, but they’re feeling pretty good about it. “I think for a small team especially, what we’ve achieved is massive,” Crabtree tells me, “I don’t know how many times I’ve played the first two hours of the game now, having to go over, over, and over and over it again, either just to record footage or to fix bugs or whatever. I still find little things in there that I forgot about that make me smile, and I had that with Paradise Killer towards the end. I think for Paradise Killer, I didn’t feel it until right before launch, whereas [this time] I’ve felt it for a little bit longer.”
“I’ve fallen in love with our characters, I think,” Noy adds, “I’m going to be so sad [when] we’re not working on it soon, but I think because I love them so much, I know that there’s going to be other people like me out there who are going to love them too.” There’s some nervousness, as the team knows it’s relying on people getting what it’s gone for with Promise Mascot Agency, but having already seen its style go down well once helps.
“We’ve made the game we want to make,” Clarke Smith says, “We know now that people like the writing of Paradise Killer. We know people like the characters of Paradise Killer, and we’ve taken those same qualities and put them into this. So, I feel more confident that if you’re going to like the game, you’re probably really going to like it.”