It isn’t escapism, until you come back – and then in its wake, escapism becomes adventure. Sure, we’re a bunch of kids playing games in a silly arcade, and maybe we’re feuding over a plastic toy that doesn’t really mean anything outside of our group, but us being together and goofing around is not trivial! Our fun is our community and it’s worth protecting. The designers of Button City fundamentally understand games as totemic, with its ‘Saturday morning cartoon’ stylings, short playtime, and a tightly curated selection of mini-games that work together to target a 90’s nostalgic audience. Button City is a brief hug of an afternoon adventure game. Soft, comfortable, and completely normal in both subtle and easily appreciable ways. Side-by-side, it makes Animal Crossing look almost manipulative and nihilistic in how that series pushes you to never ever stop playing.

In Button City you play as the new kid in town named Fennel, who finds an arcade named Button City within his neighborhood. On arrival to Button City, Fennel finds a bevy of other kids currently embroiled in a rivalry over a MOBA-styled arcade game called ‘Gobabots’. Here our shy, sheepish fox protagonist shines as he is suddenly enlisted to help his new team win the Golden Gobabot. Things get tough for Fennel and his new friends when Button City closes and you find out a greedy fat cat named Peppermint Pepperbottom is buying Button City to replace it with a big-box department store. This is the classic 90s teen-movie premise, and over the 5 hours of playtime there’s little in the way to challenge the protagonist more than sassy teens and moustache-twirling capitalist greed, but that’s totally okay! Button City has the intensity of fleece blanket, and at almost no point do they try to dramatize things beyond that point – in that way I’d liken it to if Donut County was made for kids. It’s cute!

I think it’s easy to write off Button City as a twee little Animal Crossing styled game just based on screenshots or the soundtrack, but that reduces a lot of the incredible presentation of this game. Easily the strongest part of Button City is its bold 3D dioramas and character animations which are simple but impactful. There are no wasted shapes or colors within the cell-shaded pastel palette, as this game shows exactly enough as needed, without a single vector feeling out of place. There are also a few interstitial cutscenes styled like 90s cartoons that bring fresh flair to the game each time they happen. On top of that, the UI for moving around the world by ‘teleporting’ between zones is so seamless and fun to use, that it even becomes a rather funny plot point later on in the game. I know game designers who avoid diegesis, and they’re all cowards! These moments really make the game stand out on its own when you play through it. My only problem with the presentation is that I wish there was a run button (or a ‘skip-merrily’ button) to give a little variety to how Fennel moves around his world. It can get dry moving at one speed on every screen, and anything to break that up would be nice.

There’s something special in the way that no part of Button City overstays its welcome. Despite everything in the game being so soft, there isn’t one part of the game that outshines any other. Outside of doing tasks for people along the main storyline, there are sidequests that let you get to know the characters more, playing Gobabots which has multiple heroes you can try out and build teams with, a racing game inspired by Initial D, and a rhythm game inspired by Dance Dance Revolution. All three of these mini-games understand their genres well enough to emulate them in fun ways while adding some nuance that made them all increasingly fun. By the last time I’d come back to the racing minigame I’d learned how to practically always be in a drifting position, and my best time dropped incredibly low! Normally, I’d expect folks to like or dislike certain mini-games or sidequests more than others, and maybe a game with less technical craft would have that, but there’s clearly a deft hand behind the scenes making sure each subsystem within the game has a little TLC without overdoing it in any one part. Nothing steals the show and gets overemphasized, and neither does anything ruin the game and make me want to stop playing, all playstyles are validated here. Button City really does just want you to play this for a bit and then afterwards go do something else, and I think that’s admirable.

Not that there isn’t some difficulty to pressure you, but this game is largely unchallenging. Both emotionally and mechanically, there is almost no friction to the game in any way whatsoever. The few characters that have some development encounter barely any strife, including the protagonist, whose life seems pretty idyllic outside of one plot point with Fennel’s mom that goes unexplored. The stakes to anything happening are extremely low and as soon as you are given a problem you are almost always immediately given a solution as well. I wouldn’t say that the frictionless play of Button City is a bad thing, however I feel like it could be a missing ingredient to take the game to the next level! Currently, the only friction that exists in the game is when you click on interactive objects it takes Fennel about 1.5 seconds to get to the specific spot in front of the object that lets the interaction happen. This means almost nothing in the grand scheme of things, but when it’s the only tiny bit of friction in a game that is otherwise unchallenging to the player, it becomes super noticeable and frustrating all the time. I love Button City insisting on simple moment-to-moment plot structure to emulate a 20-minute TV show structure, but I think if there was just a little more teeth to the overall plot of the game, it would add that seasonal-arc feeling that is missing.

That said, after the credits roll, there is one special moment in the postgame that really gets to where I wish more of the game would go. Button City absolutely has a ‘superboss’ that gets introduced within the Gobabots minigame, and earning that final Gobabot to play with was a highlight of my time playing through. It’s not like I showed some kind of mastery of a complex system, but beating this game’s version of a superboss still felt important and impactful proportional to the short amount of time I played through the game. I’d love to see Button City expanded along these lines, because there is so much room there for it to grow!

Over the last year the label of Wholesome Games has brought many games including Button City into the spotlight. However, Wholesome Games’ aesthetic-based curation also runs the risk of flattening certain styles of games, and Button City is firmly in the crosshairs for that kind of flattening. Through it’s adept presentation and careful design considerations, I’d say it manages to escape the gravitational pull from being ‘just another Animal Crossing looking Wholesome Game for Switch owners’. There’s more than just uwu cute heart furry feelings inside of Button City and it all comes from underneath the hood of the game.

The post Button City – Full Review, A Furry Nickelodeon-Inspired Children’s Adventure Game appeared first on Gamesline.

In 2011, the annual New York City event controversially included Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire in that year’s official selection — for reasons that were rather divisive, to be honest! Long since then, and although Tribeca has been playing around with distinct VR categories, this is the first year Tribeca has officially decided to include video games in a brand new category in hopes of bringing a new perspective to the medium and industry — perhaps since leaving behind the perception that video games should adhere to strict definitions.

Although few, the titles showcased here are certainly not far between, with many of them having already been teased in other shows and events the past year as they near the end of their respective development cycles. They are all offering something very unique to the table.

Signalis
Rose-engine

Signalis pits you in a rough dystopian world where you have to face nightmarish monsters and to uncover the truth. About what? I don’t know yet! But its low-bit artstyle clearly drawing from anime aesthetics looks rad, featuring both side-scrolling action and some first person puzzle-solving in a freaky, claustrophobic world.

NORCO
Geography of Robots

Kena: Bridge of Spirits
Ember Lab

Kena: Bridge of Spirits has already been previewed in other events in the past year, and I still can’t get over the army of cute blobs you have to maneuver and command at your whims a la Pikmin, all while juggling all the mechanics you can find in any solid action-adventure platformer. It certainly looks like it offers something both fun and vast with a new, original concept we have not seen in this particular genre, but with that optimism also comes some caution in hoping to see the Southeast Asian influences be appropriately handled as they should be in the final game.

Harold Halibut
Slow Bros.

It’s wild to me that it was not that long ago that people have constantly been on edge over whether not stop motion is a “dead” artform with the advent of high resolution 3D CGI dominating filmmaking, but we’ve been seeing one of the hardest techniques you can possibly do in animation popping up in all sorts of places — and here’s another game that uses it! I could not shake the feeling that the energy of this game felt like a Wes Anderson flick with some sci-fi undertones, and I think that perfectly encapsulates what Harold Halibut is from what we’ve seen so far.

Sable
Shedworks

Sable also has been teased for some time now, and every new snippet of footage of it heightens my anticipation for it! With a purposefully flattened style harkening to the illustrations and comic works of Moebius (Jean Giraud), the game has you trek across vast, desert landscapes in what looks like to be a world in ruin. And with Japanese Breakfast on the soundtrack to boot, it’s sure to be a tranquil, meditative experience in the same vein of something like Journey.

Lost in Random
Zoink

12 Minutes
Luis Antonio

Uh oh! 12 Minutes is another Wife-in-Peril game where Daisy Ridley is your wife and Willem Dafoe might be evil in pursuit of ruining your not-so-happy married life together. You find yourself stuck in this horrible event that unfolds within 12 minutes of your time (hence the title, get it?), and it’s up to you to make different choices to prevent it from happening and finally free yourself from this loop. For me, this was the weakest highlight in all of this showcase. I  was not that impressed with this game’s premise, given that it did not stand out to me any more differently than numerous titles already in the text-based and visual novel genre. That said, the game’s presentation of remaining in a fixed, top-down perspective was interesting, but there’s not much more to say on what new things this can bring to Saving the Wife games.

The Big Con
Mighty Yell

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