Nothing happens and everything happens.
At the end, he leaves and is - somehow - transformed by the experience.
The more I played, the more I thought about J. L. Carr’s story.
Well, last night was wild.
I checked my watch.
Mum was running out of time.
(Don’t ask.)
Don’t ask.Promise Mascot Agency is quite an odd game a lot of the time.
And if anything I’ve played it pretty straight up-front.
But underneath all this stuff is something everyone can understand.
This is a game about pressure.
Given the current cost of eggs in the local Tesco, this shouldn’t be enormously entertaining.
And yet it is.
Paradise Mascot Agency is goofy and heartfelt and funny and scary.
It’s simultaneously bizarre and warmly familiar.
I properly love it.
Any follow-up toParadise Killerwas going to be a bright surprise.
And yet Promise Mascot Agency still feels utterly unexpected.
More than anything, Promise Mascot Agency is sort of an adulthood simulator, or even a parenthood simulator.
Money is limited and outgoings are everywhere.
Also, though, there’s the van.
kick off the map.
Look at all those icons.
Clean a bunch of shrines dotted around the hills.
Convert trash bags into cash.
Chase down spectral animals for van upgrades, including a brilliant spin on a cannon and actual glider wings.
Send the restless dead back to their graves.
Onwards, outwards, upwards.
(It’s that kind of game.)
Thirdly, this grimy, hardscrabble landscape starts to feel like a place you actually know and care about.
I know this because it happened to me.
I stopped needing the map as much.
I stopped working towards unlocking fast travel because I was enjoying tooling around in the truck.
There’s a lady who runs a coffee place in the hills, for example.
She was just a pal, and if I was nearby, why shouldn’t I stop in?
And it’s thrillingly morish too.
It really is like A Month in the Country, then.
Code for Promise Mascot Agency was provided by the publisher.
