🔘🏙️ Button City | Xbox Series X | Review | 7/10 | "Pastel-Shaded Playtime with Pals" 🔘🏙️ @ButtonCity #IndieGames #GameDev

A cute and pastel-coloured adventure aimed at younger players, Button City is a simple story told with charm and an accessible and fun main game in Gobabots, propped up by other mini-games and light exploration.

Fennel is a young and shy fox that has recently moved into town, along with his mum. A keen gamer, he soon finds both friends and foes at the local arcade – Button City – and gets sucked into the oh-so competitive Gobabots league.

Button City plays out almost like a playable, long-form episode of a kids’ TV show. With mostly superficial dialogue choices, your time is mostly spent wandering around, talking to friends, picking up litter and diving into Gobabots, an isometric action game in which you and your team work together to throw fruit into a blender whilst fending off the opposing team and racing against the time limit.

Now that I’m a father, I’ve been more drawn to simple, child-friendly games as I’m making a mental list of titles that I come across to replay with my son when he is old enough. Button City very much suits that mould and features a nice line in how friends can all come from very different backgrounds and lifestyles with their own foibles.

I also enjoyed how you could traverse each self-contained area such as your home, the arcade, the local shop etc. and get rewarded for picking up litter as I despise litterers– the in-game currency allows you to soup-up your Gobabot with different weapons and the like – as well as how the game lightly touches upon more adult themes such as dementia and disabilities without being overbearing or clumsy. This deftness runs throughout the game and gives it a breeziness in the narrative that matches the bubbly music and visual style.

The other mini-games in the arcade are fun and brief diversions for a few minutes, but Gobabots is clearly the most fleshed-out and replayable, playing such a major part in the game as it does. 

I did find that the slightly finicky controls (I often found myself twitching the thumbstick to get in the exact spot to interact with something/someone) and sense of emptiness in some areas detracted from the experience. Whilst I could see how a younger person would take to the game, looking at it from my perspective as a man in my mid-thirties, things did feel a little slight and I didn’t have much to latch on to.

Button City - from a purely story-based viewpoint - is a charming tale of a young person making friends in a new town with a noble approach in simple matters such as addressing littering, being accepting of people as well as occasionally dipping into slightly weightier situations, I like how these are great things for a child to have an understanding of but this approach and focus means that there’s nothing for older players to dig their teeth into, in terms of narrative or gameplay.