Review: IDOL MANAGER promises you a dark comedy and offers a game that seems impossible

In 2021, developer Glitch Pitch and publisher PLAYISM were released Idol manager on PC via Steam. The game is a business simulation where you are a manager trying to create the next great group of idols. 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.

Have you ever dreamed of running an all girls band? Thanks to the generous offer of a somewhat questionable figure, that ambition can become a reality. Build and manage the world’s most prestigious talent agency by creating the next group of successful idols. The road to idol supremacy takes courage, grit and girls, and if you have them, baby, you’ll be a star. Or at least you will make stars.

Reviewing these management games can be really tricky as it can be hard to tell if they are poorly designed or if they are just plain bad. However, I like a good number of these games and it has been billed as a “dark comedy business sim”. It looked like a lot of fun. During my hours of play, I found the premise amusing and I can definitely see that it is addictive for people. Unfortunately, based on some reviews I’ve read on the Steam store combined with my experience, Idol manager it is badly done or extremely meta. What I mean is dark comedy is that you realize you can’t be successful in this game. I’ll do my best to break things down better now.

The beginning of the story for Idol manager you have met a dark figure who warns you of a man you are ready to go into business with. So, you meet the man who acts as a financial investor who welcomes you and is very friendly and generous. He helps you get started in the start-up process of your offices by giving you a floor plan of his building to use for free. So you have to build two offices (one for you and one for another manager), a recording studio and a dance studio as a core. Each of these rooms also requires a staff member to work them. So, you need your idols. So far this isn’t bad, except that it costs quite a bit of money (you have a large sum to start with) and you need to build one on a floor that requires rent. This immediately gets you in trouble because now you have to pay the salaries of all your new employees, including the idols, but you also have to pay the rent for at least one space.

Sure, there are good ways to make money, right? Not really. You have a simple action where you can get your group of idols to exhibit and get some money that will most likely barely cover the rent for that one space. Your other forms of income aren’t available for quite a while. When you first start out, you need to have each of your staff members do research (an action they do automatically). Once they have accumulated enough research points, you can spend them to start unlocking the things you need to write and promote songs. At least one thing is needed by each of the main staff members minus the manager to write the song, but if you want any type of marketing (i.e. 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 ton of those CDs, you lose a lot of money every time you release a single. So even releasing a single only makes you lose money. Eventually, you can throw in TV, radio, and internet shows that can be used as income, but even then they don’t get you much in the beginning. This means that you are perpetually in a downward spiral from the beginning with no way out.

Another area to talk about is idols. You can audition at any time to get new idols. There are three different levels of hearing (local, regional, national [I think]) and each costs more and more the wider the range, although as a reward you get more talented individuals. This is a good risk vs reward situation. However, it’s all a gacha at the end of the day. You are given 5 potential idols and you can take as many as you want. Each will have different stats on physical appearance (cute, sexy, etc.) as well as dance and vocal performance. Each of them will also have at least one passive personality attribute which could be as positive as someone who doesn’t take long to recover from injury or as negative as someone who loses more stats when a scandal occurs. I don’t blame this system too much because it helps shake things up in every match, but when you first start out, you’ll likely be stuck with a lot of idols with extremely low stats that translates into 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 the goals they have, such as hosting a show or directing a song at a concert. It’s all good and something I’d like to see here. Unfortunately, when socializing with girls, it is very repetitive in what is said, which causes after the 3rd or 4th time you wish it wasn’t all that took you away from managing the other aspects of your bankruptcy business. Each idol also has two meters of resistance: physical and mental. Physical stamina is spent doing activities like performing, working out, doing marketing things for an individual or a business proposition (things like photo shoots and advertising), etc. I think this is the real nail in the coffin for the game. Your idols will lose stamina very quickly and regain it very slowly. Yes, there is an action to regain stamina, but at best you get 10 back and you will spend a lot more before the next time you can recover that much. A quick note of positivity is that you can set idols to train automatically and then in the policy section check at what point they automatically stop training. This helps make things leaner, even if it means you need to keep up with their stamina even more.

You also have the ability to set and change policies related to your idol group. This includes things like your idols’ salaries, what kind of image you want to project, if romance is allowed, if your idols can use social media, etc. These have an impact which is another good idea. There are some games that would have these things just to be taste and not impact the way you play.

In story mode, you have goals to achieve in order to progress through the story. Unfortunately, I can’t really comment too much on the story simply because I didn’t get very far. What I saw of the story was decent, though nothing too surprising or anything. A big problem I have with the game is that you can’t create a second save file. You must delete your history save to start a new one. There is also a Free Play mode which is exactly the same but without the story aspects. This is for those who have finished the game and want to continue playing with different idol groups and the like. That’s fine and it’s exactly the same in terms of gameplay.

One great thing is that the first time you are in a real financial problem, your investor will save you. I honestly don’t know what happens the second time around, but I guess the game is over unless you are on the simplest difficulty.

One somewhat random aspect of the game that I thought was poor was the randomization it allowed. Whenever you create a new single or a new show you have to give it a name. Thankfully, the game has a random name generator, but it’s pretty bad. Click and it basically gives you two generic song titles grouped together into one title. It definitely leaves something to be desired, although I might also see it’s a weird thing that’s just a problem due to localization.

The last thing I want to highlight is the user interface. This game was released on PC in 2021. It looks 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 element you’re focused on, you’ve been cursed with a slider that the analog stick controls. I hate it on consoles. It also doesn’t help that to put characters in different positions you have to drag them from the menu to the appropriate spot and some of those spots seem to have the smallest hit box. There have been several times when I tried to drag an idol into my manager’s office to initiate the socialization action and it didn’t work after several attempts, so I ended up having to go to a secondary menu and tell the idol to socialize. The game doesn’t look well designed for consoles in my opinion.

At the end of the day, there are some good ideas Idol manager but those are very clouded by a feeling of impossibility. I think this Steam review sums it up best although it confuses me as to why they recommended it:

I wish the game didn’t feel doomed from the start. I wish it felt better on console. I wish it would do many things better. I wanted to enjoy the dark comedy I was promised, but I wasn’t given any such comedy, except the joke that I thought this game could offer something if I tried a second game via the free play mode.