Review: IDOL MANAGER Promises You a Dark Comedy and Delivers a Game That Feels Impossible
Back in 2021, developer Glitch Pitch and publisher PLAYISM released Idol Manager on PC via Steam. The game is a business sim where you are a manager that attempts to create the next big idol group. Recently, the team brought the game to Nintendo Switch and PS4/PS5 with an MSRP of $24.99. The team was also kind enough to provide me with a digital copy of the game on Nintendo Switch for this review. You can find my thoughts below.
Ever dreamt of managing an all-girls band? Thanks to a somewhat questionable figure’s generous offer, that ambition can become reality. Build and operate the most prestigious talent agency in the world by creating the next hit idol group. The road to idol supremacy takes guts, grit, and girls, and if you’ve got those, baby, you’ll be a star. Or you’ll make some stars, at least.
Reviewing these management games can be really tricky as it can be hard to tell if it’s designed poorly or if I’m just bad at it. I do enjoy a fair number of these games though and it was billed as a “dark comedy business sim”. It sounded like a lot of fun. In my hours playing this game, I did find the premise to be fun and I can definitely see it being a little addictive for people. Sadly, based on some reviews I’ve read on the Steam store combined with my experience, Idol Manager is either poorly done or extremely meta. What I mean by that is that the dark comedy is that you realize you cannot be successful in this game. I’ll do my best to better break things down now.
The start of the story for Idol Manager has you meeting a shadowy figure who warns you of a man you’re set to go into business with. Then, you meet the man who is serving as your financial investor who welcomes you and is very friendly and generous. He helps you get started with the process of starting up your offices by giving you one floor of his building to use rent free. You then have to build two offices (one for you and one for another manager), a recording studio, and a dance studio as your core. Each of these rooms also requires a staff member to work them. Then, you need your idols. So far this isn’t too bad except this costs quite a bit of money (you do have a large sum to start with) and you have to build one of these on a floor that requires rent. That immediately puts you in trouble as you now have to pay the salaries of all your new employees including idols, but you also have to pay rent for at least one space.
Surely, there are good ways of making money though, right? Not really. You have a simple action where you can have your idol group perform and get you a little bit of money that most likely will maybe barely cover the rent for that one space. Your other forms of income aren’t available for a good while. When you first get started, you must have each of your staff members do research (an action they perform automatically). Once they’ve accumulated enough research points, you can spend them to start unlocking things you need to write and promote songs. At least one thing is needed from each of the core staff members minus the manager to write the song, but if you want any kind of marketing (aka actually selling the song), then you need a manager to have developed at least one of the marketing campaigns. Oh, and then it costs a lot of money to release the single you just wrote and unless you can sell a metric ton of those CDs, you lose a ton of money every time you release a single. So, even releasing a single does nothing but lose you money. Eventually, you can launch TV, radio, and internet shows that can be used for income, but even then they don’t get you very much at the start. This means that you are perpetually in a downward spiral from the start with no way out.
Another area to talk about are the idols. You can hold auditions at any time to get new idols. There are three different levels of audition (local, regional, national [I think]) and each one costs more and more the wider the range although you do get more talented individuals as a reward. This is a nice risk vs reward situation. However, it is all a gacha at the end of the day. You are given 5 potential idols and you can take as many of them as you want. Each one will have different stats across physical appearances (cute, sexy, etc.) as well as for dance and vocal performance. They’ll also each have at least one passive personality attribute that could either be positive like someone who doesn’t take as long to recover from an injury or negative like someone who loses more stats when a scandal occurs. I don’t fault this system too hard as it does help shake things up each playthrough, but when you first start, you’re probably going to be stuck with a lot of idols with extremely low stats which results in very little money. Once you have the idols, you can train them with your staff to improve their stats which is great. You can also socialize with them and learn about goals they have like hosting a show or heading a song at a concert. That all is good and something I’d like to see in here. Unfortunately, when you socialize with the girls, it’s very repetitive in what is said which makes it so that after the 3rd or 4th time you wish it wasn’t a whole thing that took you away from managing the other aspects of your failing business. Each idol also has two stamina meters: physical and mental. Physical stamina is spent doing activities like performing, training, doing marketing things for a single or a business proposal (things like photoshoots and ads), etc. I think this is the real nail in the coffin for the game. Your idols will very quickly lose stamina and recover it very slowly. Yes, there’s an action to recover stamina, but at best you get 10 back and you’ll be spending a lot more than that before the next time you can recover that much. A quick note of positivity is that you can set the idols to automatically train and then in the policy section control at what point they stop automatically training. This helps make things feel more streamlined although it does mean you have to stay even more on top of their stamina.
You also have the ability to set and change policies regarding your idol group. This includes things like the salaries of your idols, what kind of image you want to project, whether romances are allowed, if your idols can use social media, etc. These do have impacts which is another good idea. There are some games that would have those things just be flavor and not impact how you play.
In the story mode, you have objectives to meet to progress through the story. Sadly, I can’t really comment too much on the story merely because I didn’t get very far in it. What I did see of the story was decent, although nothing too striking or anything. A big problem I have with the game is that you cannot create a second save file. You have to delete your story save to start a new one. There’s also a Free Play mode which is exactly the same but without the story aspects. This is for those that have finished the game and want to keep playing with different idol groups and such. It’s fine and is exactly the same in terms of gameplay.
One thing that is nice is that the first time that you’re in real financial trouble, your investor will bail you out. I honestly don’t know what happens the second time, but I imagine it’s game over unless you’re on the easiest difficulty.
A bit of a random aspect of the game that I felt was subpar was the randomization it allowed. Any time you create a new single or a new show you have to name it. Thankfully, the game has a random name generator, but it’s pretty bad. You click it and it basically gives you two generic song titles clumped together in a single title. It definitely leaves something to be desired although I could also see it be a weird thing that is only a problem because of localization.
The final thing that I want to bring up is the user interface. This game released on PC in 2021. It feels like a PC game on console and that’s not a good thing in my opinion. Instead of using the analog stick to change the item that you’re focused on, you’ve been cursed with a cursor that the analog stick controls. I hate this on consoles. It also doesn’t help that for putting characters in different locations you have to drag them from the menu to the appropriate spot and some of those spots seem to have the tiniest hit box. There were several times I tried dragging an idol to my manager’s office to start the socialize action and it wouldn’t work after several tries so I ended up having to go to a secondary menu and tell the idol to socialize. The game doesn’t feel well designed for console in my opinion.
At the end of the day, there are some good ideas in Idol Manager but those are greatly overshadowed by a feeling of impossibility. I think this review on Steam sums it up best even if it confuses me as to why they recommended it:
I wish that the game didn’t feel doomed from the start. I wish it felt better on console. I wish that it did a lot of things better. I wanted to enjoy the dark comedy that I was promised, but I was given no such comedy in any fashion except the joke that I thought this game could deliver something if I tried a second game via Free Play.
