Like millions of other people, I was briefly addicted to Animal Crossing: New Horizons in early 2020. Needing to play it for work and having little else to do, I dumped a lot of time into that Nintendo Switch game over the course of a couple of months in spring 2020. After losing a lot of bells in the game’s stalk market and getting frustrated by the slow cadence of updates, I bounced off the game hard and have had trouble returning to my island ever since. Thankfully, there are plenty of games aiming to take a shot at Animal Crossing: New Horizons‘ cutesy town-building, life simulation crown. While some people prefer games like Hello Kitty: Island Adventure, I’ve recently been hooked on Go-Go Town.
Released into Steam early access by Prideful Sloth and Cult Games on June 18, Go-Go Town is a charmingly approachable game about building a run-down city back up as its mayor. Although it’s not the most innovative game in the genre, Go-Go Town’s appealing presentation, intuitive gameplay systems, and already-present gameplay loops made it the first game in a while to remind me of why I loved Animal Crossing: New Horizons so much in 2020. With Prideful Sloth already being very transparent about its early access plans, Go-Go Town is shaping up to be something really special.
Go-Go Town begins with me being dropped off at a remote, run-down town. I was named mayor and must build it back up at the whim of a mysterious boss who only ever spoke to me over the phone. To do this and build up my town’s ranking, I needed to accrue two resources: Ego and Coins. I’d get Ego by building up the town with various new structures and decorations, eventually using it to unlock even more things to build through an in-game phone app. Coins are required to build most objects, so I needed to build shops to sell items. Acquiring resources to construct those shops and keep their items is also necessary, and this all builds up over time to create Go-Go Town’s core gameplay loop.
That’s not a radical departure from most life sim games where players have to build up a city; thankfully, Go-Go Town stands out because of how approachable it feels. Its rounded, Duplo-inspired visuals and characters make the game charming to look at, even if individual Townies don’t have the same charm as Animal Crossing‘s villagers. Go-Go Town feels intuitive to play on a controller, and it always makes it quite clear which materials I need and where I can find them on a map. By making its gameplay so seamless, I sometimes lost track of time when playing the game and looked for moments where I could squeeze some playtime in throughout the day.
That’s the same exact feeling I remember getting from Animal Crossing: New Horizons in 2020. I also think I could potentially stick with Go-Go Town rather than dropping off it hard for a couple of different reasons. On the gameplay front, as I progressed more I unlocked the ability to automate the collection of some basic materials after assigning certain Townies jobs in each section of my city. Go-Go Town also runs on a fast in-game clock, not a real-time one, so there’s little downtime and always something I could be gathering, building, or doing to improve my city.
I have faith in its post-launch support as well. While public reception to Go-Go Town has been “Very Positive” on Steam, Prideful Sloth is already being very transparent on where it wants the game to go in the future. In a developer update posted to Steam on June 25, Prideful Sloth deftly notes aspects of the game people want to see improved, such as map and zone size and worker AI. It also clearly laid out its plans and ideas for improving all of those things, starting with an update that just came out and added several bug fixes and helpful worker AI improvements.
With Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I eventually became frustrated at how slow Nintendo was to update and improve the game over time once it became a massive hit. As an early access title with keen developers, it is obvious Go-Go Town won’t have the same problem. When I think about the exciting places this game could go in the future and the fact that I haven’t even tried out its multiplayer features yet, Go-Go Town cements itself as another early access game win for 2024 and a game I don’t think I’ll be putting down anytime soon.
Go-Go Town is only available on PC via its early access program right now, but it will be coming to consoles in the future.
