Promise Mascot Agency has a solution for the open world genre's most heinous crime

rockpapershotgun.com:

The demo for Kaizen's Promise Mascot Agency throws a lot of ideas you, but at its heart, it's just a game about being a good boss.

Stripped back, it's part open world driving game, part business management. You pull up in the cursed town of Kaso-Machi, a broke yakuza with a sentient severed digit hanging out in the back of your grimy pickup truck.

You're here to make scratch helping the locals, so you'll need to recruit mascot creatures to hire out for jobs. They're a hopeless bunch, possessing all the neurotic animism you'd expect from distinctly 21st century yōkai. You're soon negotiating salaries and benefits with a giant block of perpetually weeping tofu. Then, enlisting the help of a traffic safety superhero to help out when jobs go south.

The tofu gets stuck in a door on their first job. To help out on the next, I pack them a lunch comprising a wilted hamburger from a vending machine. The tutorial missions dry up, so I open the map. It takes a moment to realise what I'm looking at. Or, rather, what I'm not.

Not a nagging map marker in sight, despite a menu telling me there are several tasks available. Promise Mascot Agency will only mark the activities available on your map if you explicity tell it to. You ask Pinky for hint, and choose the type of activity you fancy, whether that's recruiting new mascots, finding new jobs, or hiring more heroes. Once you ask - and only then - the game adds a pin showing where to find that type of task.

This is - if I'm using my academic ludology terms correctly - the good shit. An adrenaline shot for decision paralysis. A Marie Kondolance for our era's inescapable hellscape of cluttered landscapes. I have stared deep into the skittish eyes of the chattering mind monkey and sealed his lips together with Gorilla Glue, but not before heightmogging him with the gorilla on the label. Thank you, Promise Mascot Agency.

There's plenty more to love here. The town is run down and dusky, but the landscape flows in such a way that you