- Publisher: Kaizen Game Works , Kaizen Game Works Limited
- Release Date: Apr 10, 2025
- Also On: PlayStation 5, Switch, Xbox Series X
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
- Unscored
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Apr 7, 2025I'd wager that while I had fun with the game overall, part of what I'd hoped the game offered at the beginning was a mechanically-dense resource management sim where I have to carefully plan out my actions step-by-step, and while that's certainly how it looks like things will head at the start, in the end the game's actual gameplay mechanics feel like set dressing. It's essentially an excuse to get you out and about driving a Kei truck through a fictional Japanese town. There's nothing wrong with that, and we do cover games that veer towards narrative experiences, but I can't shake the feeling that Promise Mascot Agency wasn't quite what I'd signed up for - even if the end result was an enjoyable romp about reviving a town in its twilight years.
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Edge MagazineApr 17, 2025Crucially, we never lose our will to continue. [Issue#410, p.114]
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Apr 7, 2025Promise Mascot Agency's oddball, sometimes grotesque characters are actually incredibly charming, and the town of Kaso-machi is great to explore. These yakuza-managed living mascots can be messy mechanically thanks to poor balancing, but I'm won over by its truly immaculate and bizarre vibes. It's hard not to love the result, even if it could be a lot tighter.
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Apr 7, 2025It’s as if Promise Mascot Agency actively recoils from anything complex enough to take players out of the open-world driving for more than a minute or two.
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Apr 7, 2025There's genuine charm in Promise Mascot Agency that will definitely appeal to audiences already into Japanese culture and crime drama. Just be prepared to wade through the busywork of the management sim side to enjoy it.
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Jun 17, 2025So, yeah. Not for me. Which is a shame, because I'm certain that if I kept playing, I'd keep finding more things that made me laugh or smile or spark more curiosity about the town's mysteries, but I'm not willing to push through any more of this cold and oddly soulless churn to see them right now. As a functional open map, it's a treat-sprinkled diorama. Static and mundane. As a management sim, the busywork is simultaneously so insistent and so lacking in complexity or choice that I ended up on a sort of trudging, mildly annoyed autopilot, like an underpaid shopping centre security guard on a deflated Segway. Deflating to say the least.