Game: Go-Go Town
Genre: Casual, Simulation, Management, Early Access
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: Prideful Sloth | The CULT Games
Controller Support: Full
Price: US: $22.49 | UK £18.89 | EU € 20,69
Release Date: June 10th, 2024
An Early Access code was used, many thanks to Indigo Pearl.
Developer Prideful Sloth owns a cozy niche of fantastical, open-world-style games where you can roam freely and with little stress, although you might find yourself needing to set goals to keep you going. But they’re changing their formula up a bit with Go-Go Town. Now you’re the wide-eyed mayor of one of a series of small-town start-ups (no fuzzy helpers this time, just black-suited agents), and you’ll use some of the same skills from previous games to get your town up to speed. Does it work? Read on!
Go-Go Town Is As Cute As Ever
Both Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles and Grow: Song of the Evertree benefit from a bright and colorful aesthetic that suits their fantasy lands. At first, Go-Go Town may start to seem like a step back. Its fledgling township is akin to your first empty farms in Yonder, and you’re going to see a lot of brown lots and gray concrete streets. But it doesn’t take long to add a dash of color, and everything you interact with is as big, silly, and bombastic as ever.
Even the music is charming and lively, rotating tunes in and out like you’re listening to a cartoony Spotify, with the no-commercials option. It’s also just enough to keep you in the mood without disrupting your train of thought while you decide on your early town layouts.
Its conversations with NPCs are just as unserious, with town agents acting like secret agents and your mysterious boss sounding a lot like a mafia goon who just wants a town with a good pizza joint.
Letting in your first NPCs bring the town to life is a reminder that this is going to be just as odd as ever. Your potential townies are eccentric… and are those ghosts? Coming off the train? Sure are, along with werewolves. There’s also the potential to discover other strange and silly visitors, and you’ll find more than one reference to Prideful Sloth’s previous games, too.
Go-Go Town Keeps That Small Town Cozy
The first few gameplay loops are going to make fans of Prideful Sloth games feel right at home. You’ll want to run around your town space at first to see where things are, but you’ll be whipping up planks and bricks and even metal bars in no time. The controls are as simple and easy to review as ever, too, with no complicated button combos. There’s even a cheat sheet down in the corner to remind you how to access your phone and your building menu.
The only change-up that may add a few minutes of frustration is that you have a backpack as small as a pre-k kid’s. It carries less than half a dozen items, just enough to cycle the first few building materials you need and get them delivered to their rightful pallets. But it won’t take long for you to find the extra storage options, from trucks to storage boxes. This feels like it’s just an aspect of learning to manage a town this time instead of throwing everything in your backpack and sorting it out later. It makes sense for this game!
This small inventory will see you through your first shops and homes, and it’ll be no trouble to match your first challenges to unlock more options. And just before things threaten to get unwieldy, as you’re shuttling wood and stone and fruit around town to get things built and stocked up, you’ll unlock the ability to put your new residents in charge of doing that for you! Just monitor the storage boxes and know that some special orders early in this transition might need a little manual work on your part.
None of this needs to be stressful, and it isn’t. Your mayor — who can be customized at a kiosk over by the train station, doesn’t sleep, eat, or even have a stamina bar. If you lag behind on stocking something, it just means you’re not earning as much that day, and maybe a couple of visitors got grumpy. You’ll get back on top of it soon.
Even failing a checkpoint challenge, which lets you move on to the next tier of unlockable goodies, can be retried with no penalty. And with lots of time between trains of visitors and those beefy auto options (pro tip: get the town management garbage collector-building up and running fast!), you’re free to terraform the outskirts of your town to ready new areas for development and to reach some of the collectables stashed in various locations. (Second pro tip: You can terraform over the water! Go get those goodies!)
Go-Go Town Runs Great Out of the Box
Technically still in early access, Go-Go Town already displays a lot of late-development polish. While Grow could push the limits of the Switch and even got a little jaggy on the Steam Deck, Town is running great. I haven’t noticed any camera judder or other laggy issues on my Steam Deck, although I’m still in the early to middle stages of building up my town and unlocking new features to help me get hands-off.
It’s also console-ready, as the game is clearly optimized for controllers and already displays all the correct Steam Deck inputs. I doubt it’ll be long before the game is verified for the system, and the developer’s previous experience is doing them a big service here. It’s the sort of game where, even if you walk away for a few days, you can pick this back up and get your muscle memory back with no problem.
Conclusion
Although the shift from pure fantasy landscapes to a modern world with some urban fantasy trappings may be disappointing for fans of Yonder and Grow, it’s a shift that works really well for this game. You won’t have to wait long for those familiar bits of fantastical silliness to creep into your game, and the few early learning frustrations are quickly revealed as little mind tricks to help you realize this is a new kind of game for the developer. Your builds are bite-sized at first, and so are your tools. But you won’t feel hampered for long, and the sense of progression stays quick without making you feel overwhelmed.
For fans of Kairosoft and their niche of lighthearted management games, Go-Go Town is going to be a big hit. It does a lot of the same things as, say, Tropical Resort Story, but with a sillier plot and a lot fewer plates to juggle. It also features lots of Prideful Sloth’s signature style techniques, from a graphical aesthetic I keep thinking of as plump and fluffy to streamlined sim elements that avoid making you feel like you need a spreadsheet. It’s a game that’s a lot of fun already and shows clear signs of being another winner for fans of this reliable, cozy game creator. Wishlist it or try it out now on Steam!
Final Verdict: I Like It a Lot
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