What if mascots were real, living beings? What if you could hire them for promotional events? What if a giant block of tofu had crippling anxiety? Promise Mascot Agency, the new title from Kaizen Game Works, is the only game brave enough to answer these questions. It’s a strange blend of management sim, open-world exploration, visual novel, crime drama, and “The Simpsons: Hit & Run”-esque driving adventure. That combination might sound baffling on paper, but once you hop into the driver’s seat, it comes together in stunning fashion.

You play as Michi, an ex-Yakuza legend, banished to the run-down town of Kaso-Machi after losing twelve billion yen in a business deal gone wrong. Instead of killing you straight away, the head of your family sends you to the town to revive the titular Promise Mascot Agency, and make enough money to save your family. The only hiccup is the town curse, that hunts down any male Yakuza who travels there. You have to make enough money to save your legacy before the curse can get to you – and before the knives of the underworld take your matriarch out for good.

Thankfully, you don’t have to do it alone. By your side is Pinky☆ (whose name canonically includes the star) – a mascot with anger issues who is a cross between a marshmallow and a chopped-off pinky finger. You can customize Pinky☆ by finding different nail polish designs for the gigantic fingernail on the back of her head. Congratulations – you now understand the tone of this game.

If you’re familiar with Kaizen Game Works’ previous title Paradise Killer, you’ll know they have a real talent for crafting worlds that are bizarre, unsettling, and deeply compelling. They have expanded on this with Promise Mascot Agency, with an incredibly varied cast of characters who are superbly written. Kaso-Machi has been run down over time by a corrupt mayor, and each character you meet has had their life course altered by that. You start to really care about revitalising this town and helping out the strange people who live there – and maybe uncovering a larger conspiracy at play.

Promise Mascot Agency also has a fantastic sense of humour, not only in its writing but also in its gameplay design. There’s no walking in this game – your only method of transportation is your trusty Kei Truck, which you’ll drive around the run-down island town searching for collectables, mascots to recruit and new business opportunities. The world is very cleverly designed for this, and every little alleyway is just wide enough for you to careen down.

Then, there’s the entire management sim side to the experience. Every open-world action you complete earns you Fame, which levels up your agency and unlocks new opportunities. You recruit new mascots by finding them around town and making them an offer – the better the offer, the higher their stats will be. Then, you can send them to jobs that you unlock by chatting with nearby businesses.

While on a job, a mascot might run into trouble and need your help to overcome it – for example, that giant block of tofu might get stuck in a regular-sized door. When that happens, you can choose to ignore the problem and get fewer rewards from the job, or jump in to help by playing a simplistic card minigame. As you talk to characters and explore the world, you can unlock more and more Mascot Support Hero cards that you can play in this minigame.

The card game itself is serviceable but very simplistic – you just have to play cards to reach a total score before running out of time or actions. There’s no depth to the deckbuilding aspect because you can’t actually build the deck – you don’t get to craft one from the cards that you’ve unlocked; they just get added automatically. This gets frustrating as you add more and more cards, because you basically just have to redraw your hand until you get something good for the situation, and the whole thing gets a bit repetitive after a few hours – especially once you’ve got a whole bunch of mascots working jobs at once. Still, there’s a level of post-ironic humour to each of these situations that kept pulling me through.

As you progress, more and more layers get added on to your business – you can hire subcontractors to passively earn money, develop local businesses through the town hall, upgrade your agency to improve stat bonuses, and eventually even sell merch through a claw game-based distribution system. It feels a bit overwhelming at first, but the game layers them on at just the right pace to prevent you from drowning in systems. And you’ll need to utilise as many of them as you can, because you need to make a lot of money very fast.

At the beginning of the game you just need to make enough to cover your bills and keep things moving, but pretty soon you’re presented with a ticking clock; there’s a meter counting down how close the knives of the underworld are from destroying your family, and the only way to push it back is by sending back large chunks of money. At first, it feels almost impossible, and I was scrambling to make enough to narrowly escape death each time. But I was always able to scrape through by using the tools I had, and when I started to earn more money, it felt like a genuine accomplishment.

But this time pressure from the management side of the game can create a strange tension with the open-world exploration side. The island is so fun to explore and is crammed head to toe with collectables – every time I got a notification that a mascot needed help, I felt a little annoyed that I was being pulled away from slamming my truck into more cliffs. For the most part, though, this push-and-pull makes the exploration even sweeter, a reward for clicking through all the management menus and earning enough money to relax for a moment.

So, while some of the systems feel a bit less fleshed out than others, they all come together for a truly unique and undeniably compelling experience. Add in the brilliant writing, fantastic level design, and a truly banging soundtrack, and you get one of the most memorable gaming experiences I’ve had in the past few years.