Developed/Published by: Kaizen Game Works
Released: 10/04/2025
Completed: 10/03/2026
Completion: Finished it doing pretty much everything outside of getting all the garbage and signs.

I was a big fan of Kaizen Game Works’ Paradise Killer, even though I came to it late, and I’ll admit to being a bit hesitant about Promise Mascot Agency, considering the risk–a UK company making a game about wacky Japanese mascots?–but I was concerned before playing Paradise Killer that it’s vaporwaveyness was going to be grating, and it more-or-less worked, so I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Well, Promise Mascot Agency is a textbook example of that “difficult second album.” There’s a lot to like here, but there’s also a kind of messiness to it. If it was literally an album, there’d be some really discordant stuff on there, the kind of album where you want to skip every third or fourth track because it doesn’t work, and on which none of the other songs are quite fully-formed enough to quite get their hooks into you. Not an album, even, where you feel ambition got the better of them, just one where they noodled too much, for too long, and ended up with something that almost–but not quite–works, and to do anything else would require throwing away all the work they’d already done, and what’s there isn’t terrible, so it doesn’t deserve that.

In Promise Mascot Agency, you play Michi, aka “The Janitor”, a classic, Yakuza-series style honour-above-all super amazing guy, which means it makes perfect sense that he’s voiced by the literal Kazuma Kiryu, Takaya Kuroda. Michi and his yakuza brother, Toki (who doesn’t seems sus immediately at all) are ambushed on a job, leading to his family owing a truly absurd amount of debt and his death a requirement. Lucky for Michi, however, the family happens to own a failing mascot agency in Kaso-Machi, a town where Yakuza never go because… it’s cursed! The kind of curse that kills any Yakuza who goes there. Considering he’s a dead man anyway, Michi heads to Kaso-Machi in his shitey old kei truck, aiming to raise as much money with the help of a sentient finger before he croaks from whatever it is the curse does.

Promise Mascot Agency is, in a lot of ways, a mechanical follow-up to Paradise Killer. Both games are open world genre mash-ups: if in Paradise Killer you were playing a sort of first-person Crackdown smooshed into a deduction game–leaping around to collect clues–in Promise Mascot Agency you’re (kind of) playing Burnout Paradise, but driving around to collect the mascots and other things you need for the management sim. You never control Michi outside of the truck, so if you’re not driving around, you’re either in cut-scenes or menus.

Like Paradise Killer, going around the world collecting stuff is great! It’s a complete pleasure to explore, smash signs, pick things up and so on—well, past a certain point. Again like Paradise Killer, there’s an upgrade system, and while it’s better here–there are more upgrades–it’s got a problem which upgrade systems sometimes face: the upgrades don’t make the kei truck more fun they make it less shitty.

I get it from a narrative standpoint–the truck isn’t really supposed to be some incredible off-road super car–but much like Paradise Killer, one of the very first things you’re going to want to do is just find most of the upgrades and be done with it. You don’t need them all immediately, but there are a couple that make exploration so much nicer (and more rewarding) and those ones do feel like they probably should have been handed out on the critical path close to immediately, leaving the others as nice to haves.¹

But really Promise Mascot Agency’s true problem is–sadly–the whole “mascot agency” bit. Game director Oli Clarke Smith has said that the original idea came from the team’s art director, Rachel Noy, and the original idea was a 2D Kairosoft-like, but that Smith and tech director Phil Crabtree “wanted to create something bigger.”

They have certainly created something bigger, but it betrays the entire concept of the game. There’s no real management at all. You hire mascots–choosing their compensation–send said mascots on jobs, and that’s about it.

That really wouldn’t be the worst thing–I’m fine with simplicity–but for the fact that for some reason there’s also a card game jammed in. When mascots go on a job, there’s a percentage chance–higher when they’re new and low rank–that they’ll fuck up the job somehow (getting stuck in a door because their head is too huge being the classic example.) The way you solve this problem is that you have “hero cards”–collected in-world–with which you can play a simple card game to defeat the problem. The problem has HP; you play cards of the required type to damage it.

It’s not a difficult or in-depth game at all. It’s basically Top Trumps, though as you upgrade the cards by playing through the story or collecting more collectables, some cards will give you more actions or allow you to draw more cards, but generally you just play the cards with the highest damage. It feels like a really half-formed idea, and the problem is that you do it fucking endlessly.

Now, the game gives you the option of sending mascots off with consumables that will make this game show up less, but that bumps up against the game’s design otherwise, where you’re really trying to make as much money as possible. The kind of player who doesn’t use health potions on bosses “because they might need them” isn’t going to buy and burn thousands of yen worth of consumables just to give themselves a 50% less chance of a mini game that’s “quick.”

And as quick as it is, it’s unbelievably annoying to send a bunch of mascots off on jobs, think “ah, now I can do the thing I like: driving around collecting shit” and drive 30 seconds only to have a bunch of alerts meaning you have to play the card game three or four times.

It’s really disastrous for Promise Mascot Agency. Unlike Paradise Killer, where collecting stuff really ties deeply into the conversations, and getting to do another conversation with new stuff is a pleasure to aim for, in Promise Mascot Agency the actual mascot agency is just an annoyance. If you’ll allow me to return to that album metaphor, it really feels like if you got an album and there was a car alarm that set off randomly in every song. And not in a good way (I feel like I need to say this for everyone who’s a fan of experimental, car alarm-based music.)

It’s just really hard to get into an enjoyable flow with Promise Mascot Agency until you get to the point where you don’t need money any more, and when you don’t need money any more… you don’t need to send mascots off anyway!

To be honest, the whole game is just quite oddly paced. You can blame my min-max brain again, but they introduce the idea that you need to send money back to the family in a certain chapter fairly early into the game, but before that chapter you don’t have to, and you can do basically everything else in the game. So… as soon as I realised that I could play it without slowing my accumulation of money by having to send cash back (and I could instead spend it all on town upgrades or other things that increased passive income) I did that for as long as I could stand, and then basically speedran the actual plot.

And that plot is… ehhh. You obviously know why the job went wrong immediately, and the mystery of Kaso-Machi is… fine. Paradise Killer’s plot is pretty messy, but I found it came together well, but Promise Mascot Agency just doesn’t feel that rewarding. And it’s actually a problem of the mechanics.

In Paradise Killer, the reason the ending works is because it’s building on everything you’ve done: your entire time spent building a case (or cases) is all used at the end, and you really do shape what happens by your play. In Promise Mascot Agency, the climax is a big mascot competition where the odds are unfairly stacked against you. Going into it, I thought “oh man, this is actually where the card game is going to matter. It’s going to really require me to have upgraded all my cards and play them in the right order to do enough damage to win.”

But… it doesn’t. The entire end of the game is completely scripted. You can just not bother to try at all because you get deux ex machina cards in your deck after some forced losses.

This sucks! It sucks so much! It makes all the effort you expended feel wasted and it hammers home that the card game isn’t really anything at all other than something to gum up your time spent playing this. 

I got to the end of Promise Mascot Agency completely and utterly deflated. It’s a game that just works against itself. I had a jolly time driving around and collecting stuff, and while the story isn’t any great shakes, I liked the character designs and enjoyed some of the mascot story beats. But what’s portrayed as the core not only isn’t really there, the game would probably be better if it was removed.

Ah well, third albums are usually good, aren’t they?

Will I ever play it again? Rinsed this. Well, I didn’t do the races, or some of the other extra content, but I didn’t have much urge to do any of it.

Final Thought: 

Speaking of the character designs… Matriarch Shimazu. If I didn’t think everyone at Kaizen Game Works knows what they were doing with Matriarch Shimazu some of her later character poses makes it exceedingly clear they knew what they were doing. Let me simply say: 🥵.

1. I suppose the argument could be made that the most necessary ones are pretty hard to miss, but they can still be missed… ↩︎

Developed/Published by: Kaizen Game Works
Released: 04/09/2020
Completed: 19/07/2025
Completion: Convicted everyone who deserved it. Or did I?

Paradise Killer is weird.

Weird in that way that saying it’s “weird” is reductive. Because it’s weird in the way something like Twin Peaks is–weird because the decisions it makes are trying to open you up to something deeper. Discombobulation is not the point, but a result of pushing the boundaries: trying to express themes, thoughts and ideas in the way that they need to be expressed. That feeling of strangeness? It’s your brain twiddling the dials, trying to find the game’s wavelength.

I went into Paradise Killer close to blind. I knew it was “vaporwave” and that Brandon Sheffield liked it, but that was–literally–about it. I legitimately had no idea until I played it that it wasn’t a straightforward visual novel, but that it had full 3D movement!

That design is actually a pretty damn important aspect of Paradise Killer that, somehow, it’s easy to miss–the promos concentrate, perhaps sensibly, on the character design and ~vibes~. But Paradise Killer is (I think) a great example of an unexpected genre-meld, taking a visual novel detective story and spreading it around in an open-world first person collect-a-thon platformer. The funny thing is that the game it most made me think of was Crackdown. You know how one of the purest joys of Crackdown was just… jumping around, collecting those orbs? Well, that’s pretty much what you spend your time doing in Paradise Killer, as you leap around paradise, picking up a huge variety of completely useless things, currency, and very occasionally clues. It’s consistently entertaining–hitting that lizard brain need to see if you can get somewhere, then getting there, and then collecting the thing that was there (that you don’t even need)–and very cleverly gives you something to do as you ferry between different suspects collecting testimony. If I have a criticism it’s that the game’s traversal upgrade system barely exists. There are three foot baths in the game that upgrade your abilities, but once you’ve got a double jump, a dash and a (slightly annoying, intentionally frictiony) radar, you’re done, and I did that within the first… hour (I played for something like eighteen!) I’d have loved to have played this getting faster, bigger jumps, more powerful, but maybe they just couldn’t be arsed with it. Maybe they just didn’t think it was that important. But it feels like a real missed opportunity, because once you’re about halfway through and you’re schlepping across the island and there aren’t as many shiny things to pick up, it starts to feel like a bit of a chore.

Intriguingly, they don’t want to make not-shlepping too easy. While the game does include a fast travel system, it’s extremely expensive in the game’s (limited) currency, blood crystals. Save points are fast travel points, but you have to spend a crystal to unlock it, and then every time you travel from it, it costs a crystal. You also have to spend this currency for other things that probably feel more important even if they’re not, so that does mean that if you’re extremely tight with consumables like me, you might fast travel rarely (if at all.) I certainly only started doing it once I had a huge buffer of blood crystals and was collecting the last two or three pieces of testimony I needed to finish up my case. It just felt wasteful otherwise.

But speaking of the case. Paradise Killer has one of the most unusual settings I think I’ve ever experienced. Before you begin playing, you probably think, as I did “ok, a beautiful vaporwave island with unusual characters. Got it.” But as soon as you start playing, the game makes it clear that it’s not so simple at all, and asks you to piece together what’s actually going on. And what’s going on is completely fucked up.

In Paradise Killer, you play Lady Love Dies, part of a group of ageless beings, the Syndicate, who (at least on paper) are attempting to resurrect the alien gods that they worship by creating paradise in a pocket dimension. They do this by kidnapping humans from the “real” world, enslaving them, and then when the attempt at creating paradise inevitably fails, ritualistically slaughtering them all before moving on to the next island and trying again.

The game begins at the failure point of another paradise, Island Sequence 24. Every citizen has been killed, the Syndicate was preparing to move to Island Sequence 25, only for the Syndicate’s leaders, the council, to be brutally murdered. The island is immediately locked down, no suspects can leave, and as Lady Love Dies, the Syndicate’s lead investigator, you are called back to investigate the murder after being exiled for the island for 3,000,000 days for being deceived by a god (in the game’s fiction, despite the Syndicate’s goal, the gods are not even to be trusted by them.)

When I say Paradise Killer is weird, this is what I mean. You are leaping about a beautiful island paradise, bumping those vaporwave beats, talking to beautiful, largely charming people who just happen to commit a genocide on the reg. It’s… weird. And uncomfortable.

The best comparison I can come up with is to imagine that the worshippers of the Great Old Ones of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos weren’t, like, weird fish men or indescribable shapeless forms but hot dudes and babes, but that they were absolutely as completely disinterested in the idea of humanity as anything but cattle in their attempt to resurrect not so much pure evil but pure cosmic indifference. And that you play one of them and you’re supposed to be invested in them solving a crime.

The important–and difficult–aspect to emphasise here is that it’s not like you’re playing a nazi. It’s like… did you ever have an ant farm? Sea Monkeys? You know they eventually just die, right? They can’t survive in the artificial space you’re holding them in. But the likely fact is that the idea of ants or tiny crustaceans as beings who deserved a life rather than, well, something curious to observe or forget about, didn’t even cross your mind. The gulf between you is so vast. That’s what’s going on here. That’s who you’re playing. Humans are the ants.

This is… complicated, and to be honest, I’m not entirely sure how I felt about it as the background of this game. The suspects that you deal with are–generally–tired and frustrated with the system they’re part of, a cycle they can’t seem to affect. The murders occur, in the way they occur, because people are trying to create change. 

 But it’s selfish change. There is no idea of restorative justice here. In fact there’s no sense that anything can change– when you make a certain class untouchable, the system will roll on. 

So there’s a lot tangled up in Paradise Killer, and I think the thing that disconcerts me the most about it is how big and open to interpretation the themes are, but how easy it might be to not think about it all that deeply. To sort of just… enjoy the world, uncritically. I think the game does a lot of work to make that possible. The case you’re solving is genuinely interesting even with a narrow focus, and the open map allows you to solve it almost entirely in a non-linear fashion (although I found myself with several sticking points–it would have been nice if they highlighted case-specific collectibles once testimony implied what I needed to grab, some require far too much scouring.) You will, undoubtedly, invest in what’s going on, and then fixate on what the best course of action is; who really deserves judgement?

What’s interesting is that I played it very much down the line. I played it the way the game seemed to want me to: to follow the letter of the law. But at the end of the game I was most disappointed that while Lady Love Dies could execute everyone she deemed guilty, she wouldn’t turn the gun on herself. Because she was as culpable as any of them for it all. They all deserved judgement. But that’s life, I suppose. We sacrifice a few, call it justice, and the system endures.

Will I ever play it again? I don’t, ultimately, think this is a game that rewards more than one playthrough. I also don’t think I’d actually like to return to this world of cosmic horror.

Final Thought: Whether or not I’d return to it, I do think Paradise Killer was brilliant. Though it deals with heavy themes with a light touch, I do want to make clear I don’t think the game is problematic for doing so–I think it’s challenging. “Weird.” Paradise Killer gave me a lot to chew on, and I think if you’re up for it, it’s worth the effort really engaging with.