You play as an exiled yakuza (voiced by none other than Takaya Kuroda, Kiryu's VA) sent to revive a mascot agency in a cursed town, which serves as a very nice small open world setting for you to explore in your kei truck. I have to admit, I've been very taken with just driving around, it's nice.
The idea is it's a sort of lite business management simulator where you recruit mascots, negotiate their pay, send them on jobs, find more businesses that want to hire your mascots to promote their product and/or service, and earn money to upgrade your agency's office so you can earn more.
If you are like me however, you'll probably be too enticed by the game's open world and driving mechanics, there's just something about knocking off all those points of interest on a map that compels me, and you'll end up going into debt because you're distracted from the business management side.
There's a lot of really neat stuff to find exploration wise, like one character wants to read notes taken by a ghost hunter who visited the town's various haunted locations, so we have to drive to those locations and recover the notes, and we'll get a little story inspired by Japanese urban legends.
For example, one of the notes you collect is from the train station, where there's a ghostly girl who appears on the platform that I think might be inspired by the Kisuragi Station creepypasta? As a big horror fan, I was delighted by that whole side-quest, good job on the writers.
Of course, I think the real draw of the game is all the very wonderful and inspired mascots you'll get to meet, like for example Salary-Nyan. A business cat. They're all voiced, and have wonderful character art, but I think it's the writing that really makes them an endearing bunch.
I don't want to say much else, I want you to all to find out on your own all the lovely characters, mascots and otherwise, that inhabit the game's world. The neat upgrades and abilities you can get for your truck, which get absolutely ridiculous. Just a delightful time, I'm enjoying it immensely.
As always, follow my curator page for more recommendations, I'm regularly adding more and generally lean towards indie games, and I try to avoid games with predatory monetization. I've got quite a few more games to add soon! store.steampowered.com/curator/2834...
The yam-cat who years to be a mascot for the porn industry made me legit choke on my water
I loved that it dodged obvious bullets regarding punching-down at sex-workers and other marginalised folks!