Button City is a nice, casual game that will relive your youth with 3 minigames as a focus.
Type: Single-player
Genre: Adventure
Developer: Subliminal
Publisher: Subliminal
Release date: 10 Aug, 2021
Intro
Button City is a low-poly adventure game that tells about the daily life of Fennel, a little fox, and his gangmates. Three minigames become the focus of the game in addition to the exploration that the gang has to go through to deal with their problems.
Visuals
If I would describe it in one word, it would be cute. The low-poly style works well to make everyone look cute while the vibrant color palette helps to give life to its surroundings. I like the small design of each area, focusing on one object of interest at a time to make it easier to explore. Moreover, the interactable objects also become easy to distinguish due to the white outline.
Story
Since the game focuses on children’s life, it’s obvious that you’ll have a lot of silly problems to deal with. Gang wars, competitions, chill time with your gangmates – everything revolves around what the children do in the city, and the interaction between them can give a smile on your face. However, it can be hard to remember everyone’s names – there are a lot of people in the town and I didn’t even know one of my gangmates’ names until near the ending.
The Game
Gameplay
The game plays out like other adventure games where you can explore the city and move around, except that traveling between locations can be done as simple as teleporting: you just need to press a button, choose your destination, and you’ll arrive there in no time. It might not sound as impressive as it looks, but trust me, it works. It’s easier to look through the places that are available at that time and the small size of each region helps to scroll through the areas easily.
As I said before, the game focuses on three minigames. There is a simplified MOBA minigame where you can go into 4 vs 4 matches to put as many fruits in the middle as possible, a racing minigame that focuses on drifting, and a rhythm minigame where you need to press four arrow keys at the right time. The first one will be mandatory to finish the game, although you are free to skip the latter two if you want. The thing is, everyone in the town loves playing these, so you can always challenge them to play one minigame that they like.
Side quests are abundant. There are a lot of side quests that can come at an unexpected time. It helps to break the repetitiveness of the game, especially if you are fed up with the minigames. The quests usually revolve around fetch quests where you need to go to a certain location to either find or talk to people. It can be hard to find where you are supposed to go due to the number of people that you need to remember and find, but you can always scour through all areas and talk to everyone in case you are not good at remembering things like me.
Length and Difficulty
I finished the game in 11.5h, but that’s also because I took my time and challenged all residents in the game for their favorite minigame, which is not necessary to finish the game nor getting 100% achievements. The only challenge that you’ll get in this game comes from the minigames, but you’ll be able to select the difficulty and add some modifiers to make it easier or harder. I still found them to be on the easy side, although some people who don’t like rhythm games might have trouble in the harder difficulty.
Problems
The game slowed down a bit when I played the rhythm minigame in the hard mode, although it’s still within the acceptable range. There are also some bugs that I found when I played the game. Lastly, the main character’s walking speed is very slow – it can be annoying to navigate through one long area because of it.
Specs
Intel Core i5-9300H 2.40GHz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
Verdict
I’m impressed with Button City. It looks colorful and lively for a children’s game, except that it’s also can be enjoyed by adults due to its cheerful nature. The camera does a good job of zooming in on the cutscenes, making it as if you are seeing a movie. The transitions between screens, as well as the music, are also done beautifully, adding more to the experience. Sadly, the game can be taxing if you play the minigames too much like me, and some annoyances and soft locks can happen if you are not careful. It doesn’t retract my enjoyment from the whole game, but you might want to be careful because of it.
