Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
Over the years of writing about video games, I’ve come to create a special classification of title, one that mostly crops up in indie spaces: “Charm games.” Charm games are games that push the question “How far can you get by on charm?” to its limits: They’re often inventively written, with strong characters and cool ideas, tied to gameplay that can’t support more than an hour or two of solid play. A charm game is likely to produce warmer feelings in me in inverse proportion to how long I end up spending with it; look to, say, last year’s Thank Goodness You’re Here, one of the most charming games ever made, as an example. TGYH maintains that reputation at least in part because it doesn’t wear out its welcome: You run through two hours of gags, feel the basic walk-and-talk gameplay start to get stale, and then it ends on a triumphantly oddball note. Charm games aren’t bad, by any means, and they’re capable of producing some of my fondest memories in all of gaming. They just have a narrow window of effectiveness, one that comes attached to a pretty strict shelf-life.
Promise Mascot Agency is a charm game.
And that is, honestly, a bit of a bummer, insofar as it’s made by Kaizen Game Works, the studio behind Paradise Killer, one of my favorite games of the last several years. The two games share plenty of similarities, too: Both take place in fantastical spins on the modern world, with PMA set in a universe where mascots aren’t just people in suits, but living creatures who just happen to look like people in suits. (Your main companion, for instance, is an ambulatory pinky finger who is both mildly grotesque and surprisingly cute.) Both ask you to navigate large worlds filled with crap—sometimes literal garbage—to pick up off the ground. Both make moving through that space kind of a pain, only to slowly ease up as the player pushes out at the edges and acquires upgrades. And both are filled with vibrant characters and funny writing that interject frequently to break up the grind. On paper, you can easily see how both games came from the same people.
The difference, in practice, is that Paradise Killer was a detective game, and Perfect Mascot Agency is… okay, it’s actually kind of hard to describe. But it’s basically a weird hybrid of driving game and management simulator? And then a flight sim, several hours in? It’s a deliberately messy package, and that’s genuinely part of the fun, throwing new curveballs at you with some frequency. But the issue is that none of those genres interface well with what the game really is, and what Paradise Killer was, too: a world exploration game. Both games want you to learn about their strange environments firsthand, moving through them, picking up—again—sometimes literal trash, and experiencing their spaces as spaces. (There’s a reason both games are incredibly stingy with fast travel, for instance.) And that level of granular appreciation naturally dovetails with being a detective. When, in Paradise Killer, I managed to screw around enough to figure out how to get onto the roof of a major building, and then found clues there that helped break the case wide open? It was exultant, my pack rat tendencies rewarded by plugging directly into the parts of the game I was most fascinated by. When I did something similar in Promise Mascot Agency, all I got were cards that power up its Mascot Rescue mini-game. (Oh, it’s also a card game! And sometimes kind of a shooter? Promise Mascot Agency contains multitudes, as long as you don’t need any of them to be especially deep.) It’s neat, but it doesn’t synthesize the game’s larger and smaller goals in the way that Paradise Killer did.
You could argue, fairly that I just like detective games more, which, yeah, absolutely. But it’s not like I don’t enjoy what Promise Mascot Agency is riffing off of, too: The game is clearly trying to evoke the feelings of Sega’s Yakuza/Like A Dragon franchise, right down to casting Takaya Kuroda, Kazuma Kiryu himself, as your disgraced yakuza protagonist. Like those sprawling beat-em-ups, PMA wants you to indulge in the bizarro texture of its world, exulting in the pleasures of mundane moments in between high-level drama and silliness. (There’s also the whole business sim element, although, honestly, Yakuza: Like A Dragon or Yakuza 0‘s versions of business management were probably more robust; after 8 hours with Promise, I mostly just cranked up passive income as high as I could and sailed through my days of former gangster exile.) I really like (i.e., am charmed by) the game’s writing and comedy, which are often aggressively weird and genuinely funny, while still having smart meditations on the nature of small-town living. I just want the parts where I’m out driving around in my truck, cleaning shrines, recruiting mascots, running errands, etc., to feel like they’re contributing to something, and not just serving as chores in the guise of something more spiritually robust. I want to be charmed, and I am; I also wish I was having my mind engaged, as well.
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