I picked this game up on a whim after I read a Polygon article about it: Zohran Mamdani’s win made Promise Mascot Agency the most relevant game of 2025, and I only regret not playing it sooner.
On its surface Promise Mascot Agency a game about a disgraced Yakuza being exiled to a small failing town and trying to build up a mascot agency to pay back 12 billion yen from a deal gone wrong. Beneath the surface it’s about rooting out corruption, fighting for what is morally just, fighting for your family, accountability, legacy, honor, and commitment. It’s further got queer, trans, and kink friendly themes, a little bit of the occult, and neglectful fathers! Truly it has everything.
Throughout the whole game you can just tell it was a passion project for the team. The voice acting, which is in Japanese only, is emphatic and heartfelt and the writing is clever and compelling. Each character feels fully fleshed out and unique. The island setting is beautiful. It’s not huge, and it’s not overly complicated, it feels just right for a shorter game like this (I did a 100% completion of the game within 26 hours).
As stated, you, as a disgraced Yakuza named Michi, are tasked with rebuilding a failed mascot agency. The first immediate twist is that mascots are not humans inside of costumes but instead they are their own living creatures sometimes with special powers and abilities. Otherwise the mascots are still mascots who do events and promote things, and thus as the head of this agency it’s your duty to recruit and send mascots on jobs to raise money. You are also responsible for making sure they’re getting paid enough and are satisfied in life. The mascots don’t really have a union per se, but there are a lot of pro-union and pro-employee themes in the story. I guess part of why the mascots don’t need to unionize against you is because you’re legitimately committed to making sure they’re happy, even going to lengths to help them achieve personal dreams and life satisfaction. They should still unionize, of course.
Your partner at the agency is Pinky☆, a mascot who is currently running the agency as a failing love hotel. She was perhaps my biggest hurdle to staying in the game at first. Don’t get me wrong, she’s a fantastic character, very well written and acted, with such fuck-‘em-up millenial energy. It’s just that her particular mascot design is.. a severed pinky finger.. And you can collect nail paint designs for her big pinky nail…. which certain designs gave me the weirdest dysphoria??? She’s a fucking gem though and her characterization is top notch. She’s perhaps the grossest mascot to me, but she does immediately help you set your expectations of what a mascot can be.
The two of you work together to build your agency, or as you quickly start to realize: your new family, while also working to turn this dying town around. The bond formed between Michi and Pinky☆ forms quickly and strengthens through adversity. The whole game just reminds me of this tumblr post:
Image Description: Screenshot of a tumblr text post by ominous-ellipses dated Dec 25, 2023:
FOUND family??? you think i just found them like this??? babes this is FORGED family. Me & the bros were scrap metal in a junkyard (very valuable, very sharp, very dangerous, uncared for) and we GOT IN THE FUCKING FIRE TOGETHER. WE did this. we said I AM NOT LEAVING YOU and melted into each other for better or for worse (it’s for better) and we are A FUNCTIONAL UNIT now. DO NOT SEPARATE. BATTERIES FUCKING INCLUDED. FOUND family my ass, we built this non-nuclear family unit from the ground up, don’t devalue this!!! it was is and will be a labour of love!!!
Let’s just say that the concept of forged family speaks incredibly deeply to me.
There is a moment right at the end climax that is so fucking cliche but also I cried ANYWAY because it was so effective and heartfelt. I won’t spoil it, but if you’re familiar with anime tropes you won’t be surprised by it at all.
The gameplay is a nice mix of management and item collection. Sending your mascots on jobs requires engaging with the town and finding people who have jobs for the mascots to do. Then you gotta make sure your mascots have the energy and experience for the jobs you send them on while also making sure they’re happy with the pay you’re giving them. In your travels you’ll encounter a lot of things you can collect on the island that help you out. You explore the island by driving your kei truck which can be upgraded after collecting blueprints. The driving feels good and never super frustrating. The game also has some nice quality of life things that at first glance feel a bit weird, but after a few hours of exploring you really start to appreciate the design. First off, you’re the only moving vehicle on the roads. There’s the occasional parked kei truck but they’re never in the way. You will also see ghostly outlines of citizens, but they just fade away as you get close to them. There’s no people or cars to truly run into or get in your way, which makes driving around town feel very free. The trees in the forests also have no hitboxes which feels super weird the first time you go through one, but once you get the glider upgrade you understand how much better it is without forest tree collision.
This was my absolute favorite game that I played this month and I highly recommend it to everyone. I want to talk about it so much more, but it’s definitely the kind of game where going in kinda blind really helps. Not for like super twisty reasons or anything major like Outer Wilds, but because I don’t want to spoil any of the emotional beats.
Promise Mascot Agency is on everything modern and only $25. It came out last year and I would also call it my Game of the Year 2025, except I didn’t play it in 2025 =P