Promise Mascot Agency review | Eurogamer.net

One of the loveliest books I’ve read in the last few years is J. L. Carr’s short novel A Month in the Country. The book’s about a lot of things – and I may have written about it before on Eurogamer – but, broadly, the novel concerns a veteran of the first world war who turns up in a small village up north to uncover a piece of art that’s been concealed in the church. For a month he works in the church, restoring a lost mural element by careful element, having nightmares of the mud and gas at night and making tentative friendships during the day. Nothing happens and everything happens. At the end, he leaves and is – somehow – transformed by the experience.

Promise Mascot Agency is not very similar to A Month in the Country – in a minute I’m going to make that extremely clear by listing some of the things it contains – and yet it reminds me of the novel in a way that little else does. The more I played, the more I thought about J. L. Carr’s story. Again, this game is about a lot of things, but one of them is about finding a new way of being in a new landscape. It’s about getting away – in less than ideal circumstances – and finding out that life continues, that life is still rich.

How rich? Well, last night was wild. I was cleaning shrines up in the hills when I got a call that my mother was about to be killed by proper professional villains unless I paid some protection money pronto. My bank account was almost down to zero, though, and the sun was setting, which meant my nightly bills were coming and they would surely take me even further into the red. I raced, wallet empty, over to the nearest payment ATM, jouncing along in my rattling van that was decked out for a political campaign I was currently running against the town’s crooked mayor. I checked my watch. Mum was running out of time. My only hope was that a giant over-sexed, yam-covered cat (don’t ask) who I’d sent to cheer people up at a local bookstore (don’t ask) would do the job and bring home some cash in time for me to transfer it before all those bills swept it away and my mum ended up in the river. (Don’t ask.)

Don’t ask. Promise Mascot Agency is quite an odd game a lot of the time. And if anything I’ve played it pretty straight up-front. This game has weeping tofu mascots getting into fights with badly stacked boxes, a train station part run by kittens, papery ghosts circling the hills and alleyways, hands joined, and, oh yes, the giant thumb I travel around with, who likes to ride in the back of that van and spout obscenity-laced wisdom at the worst moments.

But underneath all this stuff is something everyone can understand. This is a game about pressure. The pressure of time: how to use it, how to save every last second, how to translate it into distance covered. The pressure of cash: how to make it, how to keep it, what to spend it on and what to do when you don’t have enough of it. For the first third, at least, when you’re really struggling, it’s a kind of temporal and financial survival horror. Given the current cost of eggs in the local Tesco, this shouldn’t be enormously entertaining. And yet it is. Paradise Mascot Agency is goofy and heartfelt and funny and scary. It’s simultaneously bizarre and warmly familiar. I properly love it.

Any follow-up to Paradise Killer was going to be a bright surprise. Paradise Killer, after all, was an adventure game in exactly the same way that Moby-Dick is the story of a workplace injury. And yet Promise Mascot Agency still feels utterly unexpected. Playing the role of a cast-out yakuza, you’re sent to a small run-down town to lie low for a bit and get the local mascot business going again. At the core of the game, you’re finding and recruiting mascots, who are the odd, sometimes monstrous characters you see at sports games, except I’m not sure these have actual humans beneath the costumes.

These guys! You negotiate terms with them, arranging their cut of proceeds and how often they get things like bonuses and rest days, then you send them out on jobs – to bookstores and love hotel parties and schools and bakeries and those kinds of things. Often the mascots mess up and need your help, so you find yourself playing a brisk CCG against foes that could be a swarm of bees and could be a stalker or a demonic wolf or a walkway that’s a little uneven. The mascots eventually bring in the money, and that money you use for… well… there are a lot of uses.

More than anything, Promise Mascot Agency is sort of an adulthood simulator, or even a parenthood simulator. Money is limited and outgoings are everywhere. The world you find yourself in is hard to understand and filled with strange complexities, and your chaotic charges need a lot of help to keep them engaged and focused and out of danger. The questions you face daily include how to spend your money wisely, how to make friends and help them when they’re in need, and how to leave the world a little better off than the way you found it.

Also, though, there’s the van. A lot of Promise Mascot Agency involves what you do in between sending your mascots out to events and the point at which they either return with cash or phone up saying they need your help with some narrow doorways (don’t ask). In these moments, you race around a compact open-world in your upgradable van, meeting new people – each fresh face gives you a new card you can use when battling to keep mascots on track at events – as well as understanding the story of the place and how it came to be so run down and neglected.

Inevitably, it’s your job to do something about that, and you largely do this in classical open-world fashion. Open the map. Look at all those icons. Get to it! Clean a bunch of shrines dotted around the hills. Knock down a rival politician’s posters and – once you’ve decided that the thumb you roll around with should run for mayor – replace them with your own. Convert trash bags into cash. Chase down spectral animals for van upgrades, including a brilliant spin on a cannon and actual glider wings. Go fishing. Send the restless dead back to their graves. Onwards, outwards, upwards.

Two things happen while you’re rattling around, ticking stuff off the map, and sending your mascots out. No. Three things. Maybe more. (It’s that kind of game.) First off, you go from getting a sense of the town and its inhabitants to properly bringing it back to life, upgrading areas, clearing trash and reopening old routes and blocked paths. Secondly, you go from just scraping by – and ruining your finances every time you get a call about mum – to having a decent amount of spare cash to invest in things – like upgrades for your base and means of passive income.

Thirdly, this grimy, hardscrabble landscape starts to feel like a place you actually know and care about. I know this because it happened to me. I stopped needing the map as much. I stopped working towards unlocking fast travel because I was enjoying tooling around in the truck. I started visiting people not because they might upgrade my cards or give me new mascot jobs but because I liked seeing them. There’s a lady who runs a coffee place in the hills, for example. Tell her about your new mascots and she turns them into deserts that you can give mascots as buffs when they head off on jobs, but that isn’t why I was visiting so often. She was just a pal, and if I was nearby, why shouldn’t I stop in?

So yes, this game is weird and creative and filled with things that come as a huge surprise, but underneath all that it’s also a simple delight, a story about getting to know people and working out how you and your giant, generally slightly rude thumb, might help them out. It’s about working to make a place shine again, but also working to understand it, and to understand, perhaps, what’s actually gone wrong here and why.

And it’s thrillingly morish too. Ultimately Promise Mascot Agency can revel in the weirder elements of its story because the underlying design is so solid and familiar. It really is an open-world game about visiting map markers and ticking off tasks when you get down to it, and it’s almost an idle game about investing your time and money to watch the numbers go up as well. With such reliable genre roots, the developers can throw in all kinds of whimsy and it just makes things richer – the kind of whimsy that makes the map markers you’re ticking off truly pleasurable, and that gives you genuine pause as you’re considering your various means of passive income.

Promise Mascot Agency’s in the old business of giving people what they want, but in a way they didn’t expect. It really is like A Month in the Country, then. In both cases, I didn’t expect it, I didn’t know I wanted it, and after I discovered it, I couldn’t easily express how grateful I was.

Code for Promise Mascot Agency was provided by the publisher.