Go-Go Town! is an unholy mishmash of games that manages to be chaotic, charming, unhinged and compelling all in one. It’s colourful. So, so silly. And it’s fun!
Imagine, if you will, someone taking Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, and the Mii Parade from the Wii and shoving them in a food blender. Spray the whole thing with brightly coloured paint and add a big dollop of goofy. Now you’ve got Go-Go Town!
The game starts with you, the player character, being flung from a moving vehicle in a duffle bag. After that, one of what seems to be the Men in Black tells you that you’re the new mayor of a half-block of podunk nowhere. He and his cohort of identical Agent Smith lookalikes teach you the basics of running a town, then get the hell out of dodge. You’re the mayor now! Congrats!
What’s a mayor gotta do?
As the player, your job (if you choose to accept it) is simple: grow the town, and make money. That’s about it. At first, you have to gather and process the materials yourself (classic mine rocks-smelt rocks, chop wood-saw wood stuff). You build houses for your residents, businesses for them to work in, and provide the raw materials for their jobs. At first, it’s simple materials, like rocks to make pet rocks (nope – not joking). As the game progresses, however, more lucrative jobs need more complex materials, processed multiple times.
Also, because you’re the mayor, you get to cut a cute little red ribbon for every new building. It’s the little things, isn’t it?
As your town grows, you can get the residents to start doing the grunt work like, for instance, gathering and processing materials. You can hire a courier to ferry materials around, a bin man to collect the rubbish, etc. etc. Who’d have thought? A town where the mayor doesn’t have to empty the bins! Will wonders never cease?
Who’s buying this stuff, you may ask? Firstly, it’s Townies. These are the residents of Go-Go Town! My first Towny, for example, was called Baldo. He was bald. He wouldn’t join my town until I hit 15 people with my car (again – nope, not kidding). Go figure. Secondly, there are the Tourists. These are mainly – and I wish I was kidding – ghosts and werewolves. They pretty much just wander around buying things and gawking at the sights. This generates Ego, which brings us nicely to…
Tech Progression in Go-Go Town!
Ego is the “research” currency in the game. Mainly, it allows you to unlock new structures, recipies and so on. Because each unlock provides a limited number of buildings, you’re gonna want to spend Ego often. Because Go-To Town!‘s progression is in set tiers, each new unlock brings you closer to advancing the whole town. Neat!
Speaking of which, once you reach specific milestones, you unlock Challenges! These, funnily enough, challenge you to hit certain goals (mostly, make x amount of money in y amount of time) and then you level up the town. Radical.
All this combined makes for super addictive gameplay. Because the systems are so complex but intuitive, you find yourself saying things like “If I just gather more octopuses to turn into sausages (somehow), I’ll get enough money to impress all these ghosts into making my town bigger”. Wow, it really is bizarre when you lay it all out like that. However – super fun.
Early access: should you get involved?
Go-Go Town! go-goes into early access on June 18th. We’ve all been burned by early-access games in the past. So, should you get it?
Long story short, yes. If you like cozy resource management games, you’ll like this. Moreover, if you like goofy bizarro weirdness fever dreams, you’ll like this.
Long story long, here’s some pros and cons:
Pros:
++ Compelling gameplay loop
++ Goofy & charming humour
++ Visually and musically lovely
++ Huge amount of content to sink your teeth into
Cons:
— The progression is pretty linear, so replayability isn’t great. As a result you can’t specialise your town, and you’ll always progress through the tiers in pretty much the same way
— Resource gathering is tedious and your Townies are very, very slow at doing it for you
Overall, I’d recommend it. If in doubt, there’s a demo out right now on Steam and you can try it out for yourself!
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