REVIEW: The stray mascots of Promise Mascot Agency gave me hope we'll survive 2025

The last place I expected to find hope for the nightmare year that has been 2025 is in the giant sparkly eyes of a severed pinky. But that's just the kind of world we live in right now.

And I'm all for it.

An in-game screenshot of Promise Mascot Agency. It depicts a conversation between Pinky, the severed finger, and Tofu, a giant block of Tofu. Pinky says: "We're all about making dreams come true and if your dream is to make a difference in people's lives and crush old men under your boot, we're here to help."

Just the Facts

Developer: Kaizen Game Works Limited

Publisher: Kaizen Game Works Limited

Platform(s): PC*, PS5, Xbox Series S/X, Nintendo Switch *denotes platform reviewed

Price: $24.99

Release Date: April 10, 2025

Review key provided by publisher via Neonhive.

A pinky promises pure pleasure

Promise Mascot Agency is the latest game from Kaizen Game Works Limited, a UK-based studio that came out of nowhere to deliver the narrative darling that is Paradise Killer. After their godly murder mystery, the team is back with a game that sees a disgraced yakuza lieutenant exiled to a ruined town to run a mascot agency. Video games are so good.

Our begrudging hero is Lieutenant Michi, a man exiled for a botched yakuza job that would have set his family up for life. This exile saves him, an alternative to the murder he "deserves." He is instead forced to take on the grunt work of running a dead-end job in a dead-end town as penance. Kaso-Machi is a coastal town in Japan: a place left abandoned by younger generations moving to the cities, giving tourists no motivation to visit, while the greedy mayor left in charge bleeds the town dry. Michi's visit in town becomes pretty quickly tied to a deeper conspiracy that, while oddly serious and dry at times, is incredibly compelling.

I'm sure this sounds a bit more grounded than you were expecting based on the game's elevator pitch, but Kaizen Game Works has one more card to play.

In the world of Promise Mascot Agency, mascots are more than people sitting in giant, cutesy, hollowed-out foam suits, representing a town's vibe or its major export. They are living, breathing beings. Pinky, Michi's right hand... finger... is a literal fleshy giant severed pinky with adorable sparkly eyes and nubby limbs. To-Fu is an actual giant block of silken tofu with a chunk missing from their head. And so on.

The cast of characters is consistently unpredictable and immediately endearing, making each new mascot recruitment a task I never came to regret. I dare not spoil too many of the special characters waiting for you in the game, but know you're going to encounter some beautiful weirdos.

These flesh and blood beings live amidst humans and work like the rest of us. Some work regular jobs, some work at mascot agencies to promote other businesses. And it's in Kaso-Machi's defunct mascot agency that Michi and Pinky meet and quickly establish the goal of reviving the agency, and the town in turn, together and with the help of the local mascots who've been left in the lurch since the agency shut down.

Promise Mascot Agency is a tale of strays, oddballs, and freaks all striving for something more and coming together to try to find a way forward despite governmental corruption, painful mental blocks, and a society that has left them behind. It's a story about finding strength in mutual aid, about the "right" way not always being the right way, and about finding empowerment in the things you otherwise might be ashamed of.

Despite the genuinely hilarious and near constant tongue-in-cheek writing and the fantastical elements of its narrative, Promise Mascot Agency delivers a grounded story whose beats ring true with the world we live in today.

Promise Mascot Agency is a tale of strays, oddballs, and freaks all striving for something more and coming together to try to find a way forward despite governmental corruption, painful mental blocks, and a society that has left them behind.

All I know is, if I ever run into a grumpy-looking Japanese man and a giant fleshy pinky with a face outside my house in a stylish kei truck, I'll listen to whatever they have to say.

An in game screenshot of Promise Mascot Agency. Against a red toned sunset, a Japanese kei truck with wings flies through the sky with a giant severed finger mascot sitting in the truck bed. A town can be seen below.

Managing mascots is mega-cool

Promise Mascot Agency is an interesting hybrid of a game that is equal parts vehicle-based open world collect-a-thon and streamlined business management sim, all wrapped up in a neat narrative bow with some of my favorite character writing of the year so far. All of your interaction with the world comes behind the wheel of Michi's kei truck: a humble, sturdy vehicle that controls responsively and becomes a character in its own right by the end, when you eventually install boost upgrades, wings to fly, and an engine that essentially makes it a boat.

Driving up mountains, jumping over fences with the truck's built-in bunny hop, and soaring off the town's peak to get back to the Promise Mascot Agency never lost its sheen. It's a little clunky and weighty at times, but that only made it that much more endearing as I learned to work with its quirks to get from Point A to Point B as fast as possible.

As you drive around, you can clean up random bags of trash, bash through signs promoting the corrupt mayor, and collect random items in the world that advance new storylines or help your mascots with their work. From beginning to end of my 20-hour playthrough, I was still finding new things on Kaso-Machi to collect, and while most of the work collecting it was busywork and fetch quests, it perfectly supplemented the management half of the game.

As a mascot manager, your job is to recruit new mascots and offer them an appealing enough job by building a perk package that's worthwhile to boost their initial stats (happiness, motivation, and popularity); then, finally, send the right mascots out on the right jobs to satisfy both the client and your mascot. It sounds like a complicated affair, but Kaizen Game Works makes it as simple as possible thanks to clear UIs and tools that streamline the menu-diving experience.

There's even a collectible card game that has you saving your mascots from trouble, playing hero cards to eliminate the health of, say, a too-narrow doorway or a rowdy dog. It's simple to pick up, and it's a small but fun diversion in the greater picture of it all.

When you're not managing things, you're just spit back into the open world to do some kei truck exploring.

It's a cycle that you can lose hours to: send mascots out on jobs, then pass the time driving around Kaso-Machi in your truck and picking up new items that'll make your mascots better at their gigs. Once jobs are complete, collect the cash and use it to upgrade your facilities or renovate parts of the town, which all feeds back into the agency and its success. Annnnd repeat.

Eventually, your operations become a well-oiled machine that can almost run on autopilot. My only real major complaint about the management side of things is that you can't have it run literally on autopilot.

I understand wanting the player to carefully make choices early on, but in the end, when I was sending out mascots solely to see their three-act "Life Satisfaction" events and watch their character development unfold, I wished the game would just automate the rest for me.

Otherwise, the open world checklist goblins of the world will eat up how perfectly these two halves of the game perfectly feed back into one another.

An in-game screenshot of Promise Mascot Agency. It depicts the in-game mascot recruitment menu that sees you offering certain job perks to entice the mascot to work for you.

A town that grows on you and grows with you

On the whole, I did at times wish there was something else to do in the game. Maybe kei truck racing; something more involved to use your mascots for; or some bigger ever-present threat to your operations, beyond the payments you need to send back home to your yakuza family every so often to "keep the blades away" from your matriarch.

As an open world goblin, I emptied the map of its treasures fairly early and started to feel the fetch quest fatigue a bit too strongly in the later stages. But even then, the narrative reward — seeing where Michi and Pinky's story went next or following a mascot's character arc — made up for those moments in most cases. The game's writing does so much to uplift the experience and make every little routine gameplay moment worth it, and my heart was swelling by the time I rolled credits.

Promise Mascot Agency does feature a decent amount of voice acting as well, entirely in Japanese, and the team gathered up an incredibly talented voice cast for it. Delivering the calmly dark demeanor of yakuza legend Michi comes... a Yakuza legend himself, Tayaka Kuroda, who is most known for his depiction of Kazuma Kiryu in the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series. The entire voice cast is just as perfectly chosen — like the Japanese voice of Tears of the Kingdom's Purah, Ayano Shibuya, providing that perfect level of chaotic cheeriness to Pinky — and their performances breathe even more life into already personality-packed designs.

...equal parts vehicle-based open world collect-a-thon and streamlined business management sim, all wrapped up in a neat narrative bow with some of my favorite character writing of the year so far.

Pitch-perfect casting is just one piece of the carefully constructed presentation puzzle. Between the nostalgic '90s film grain filter that made each sunset an nostalgic trip and the Showa era-inspired soundtrack from Resident Evil 3 remake composer Ryo Koike, there is a cohesion to the game's aesthetics that sends you to Kaso-Machi in a very real way.

But my favorite part of Promise Mascot Agency's visual experience is the visual growth you can actually see all throughout the game.

The shadowy silhouettes that stand in for townsfolk and tourists slowly grow in number the more you invest in Kaso-Machi, and your renovations visibly clean up the town. You can tangibly see the results of the work going into this revitalization project of yours. Even character portraits evolve as your relationships do. It goes a long way in making you feel the impact of your actions and like your efforts matter — and in These Times We're Living In... I needed that.

An in-game screenshot of Promise Mascot Agency. It showcases the mascot trouble screen that is depicted like a live broadcast like a Japanese panel show in its aesthetics. A giant mascot of an eel with its chest cut upon stands in front of a stovetop shooting out flames. Three cards can be seen that the player chooses from. The one selected is for "Shiori" and shows a woman with black ponytails bent over laughing.

I played Promise Mascot Agency just days after finishing the latest in the Like a Dragon series... and I was amazed at how much more emotionally entangled I became with the narrative and characters delivered by Kaizen Game Works than the similarly grounded-but-silly legends at RGG Studio. And I don’t say that to pit two beautiful queens against each other — just to emphasize how Promise Mascot Agency manages to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a series so iconic, one that the devs certainly had in the back of their minds when they began to develop their yakuza protagonist.

Promise Mascot Agency's blend of management and open world busywork is no doubt an acquired taste, but its narrative is a worthwhile and sincere experience in the face of the levels of oppression our world is grappling with today. It might be a silly game where a perverted cat covered in (allegedly) white sticky yam fights for the safe consumption of Japanese porn, but it's also a game where misfits band together and fight against incredible odds to make life better for their neighbors. And that's not just what the games industry needs right now, but what we all need.

Video Games Are Good and Promise Mascot Agency is . . . GREAT. (8/10)

+ powerful and silly story of community strength and family; management systems and open world exploration feed into each other beautifully; cohesive aesthetics perfectly sell the whole package

- not all mascot stories are equally compelling; the further you get, the more repetitive it becomes; management systems could have used some late-game automation

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