Developed and published by Subliminal, Button City is a story-centric adventure game on Nintendo Switch following a group of young friends that want to save their local arcade from shutting down. It wields a cute and quirky aesthetic with a surprising depth of character, and pulls you in before you even know you’re on the hook.
Button City uses a low-poly, Animal Crossing-esque aesthetic. Having never played it, I know I am unlikely to appreciate the nostalgic pull, but the simplistic art style did well to compliment the themes of the story. Similarly to the film, Goonies, the story is from the perspective of young kids when everything is on the line. Adults wouldn’t likely put as much stake to some of the adventures the characters go on, but they manage to pull you in, tapping into that nostalgic feel of when you were a kid. Eavesdropping on a community adult, or collecting the coolest possible robot figurine suddenly became my highest priority. The quasi-seriousness combined with the cute and simple art made for a fun atmosphere alluding to my own childhood.
But despite the cute one-liners and rounded art style, Button City managed to surprise me with doses of reality that made me appreciate the characters and world even more. The kids you meet would come along for adventures, but you’d learn about their own layered backgrounds. The characters in Button City aren’t just goofy caricatures; they experience real world issues that made me far more invested in the storyline than I ever thought I would be.
Starting the game, I thought I’d encounter a railroaded story experience, but Button City is a world ripe with exploration. You can visit any place you’ve been before very quickly and easily. Each area is contained in a small island of gameplay, and you can fast travel to other areas with a click of a button. There are many characters to meet and places to explore compacted into each island, even being able to complete side quests. The game will often set aside time for you between bits of the central story to go back and soak in the many areas of the town. You can talk to new characters for more side quests or buy cosmetics and snacks. I find this in-between time helps the player get more invested into the town and sense of community that Button City tries to build. The game very easily could have omitted these features, committing to their main dialogue, but would have been far less of a complete experience.
But I do find that Button City falls short in a fair few portions of technical design. I immediately noticed when starting the game that you had the ability to cancel interacting with a game object. When you interact with something, it plays a wind-up animation that positions the character in the only location you can interact with that object from. If you move your character during that, it completely cancels the initiation and you have to start the wind-up again. The time consumed is only a few seconds, but it can create unnecessary moments of frustration that don’t even exist in other games that utilize similar basic mechanics. When I talk to a character or try to open a door in Pokémon, I don’t expect to accidentally cancel the interaction. It feels like a strange decision, reinventing the wheel when the world has been using helicopters.
I was similarly confused by the camera control. When on an island, the camera will rotate around the circumference of the island as you walk around the building. This makes sense and feels seamless. But once you’re inside it continues to use this circular motion. The camera will begin rotating despite just moving straight forward to another side of the room. The room will literally be spinning and you can feel motion sickness seep in. You can disable the rotating camera completely in the settings, but then you lose the outside rotating camera, which has no such issues. I think Button City would be far better serviced by dynamically changing it depending on whether you’re inside or outside and maybe expanding the setting controls to allow for the enabling/disabling of either.
But these issues don’t ruin Button City, just make it harder to enjoy. It feels like the developers have put a lot of love and passion into the project, and a couple QOL updates would do wonders to help wrap it up in one nice package. I very much enjoyed getting to know the characters, exploring, and somehow even picking up trash became a fun collectible. There’s much to do in Button City and I recommend the game to anyone looking for some adventure.
7/10
Check Out the Button City Trailer:
For more information, please visit: Button City (buttoncitygame.com)
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Nintendo Switch Review
My name is Devon Huge. I'm passionate about writing, art, games, and lists that are one item too long.
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