Developed By and Published By: Prideful Sloth
Category: Simulation
Release Date: 07.16.26
Price: $32.99
I love city and town building games. Growing up, Sim City 2000 was one of my favorite games and I love games like Metropolismania and Cities Skylines. I also love Prideful Sloth. When I was at PAX East in 2018, I found one of their games called Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles. I bought it, and it became one of my favorite PS4 games. A few years later, I found out that they were building a new town building game, and that got me really excited.
When I was at PAX East in 2023, Prideful Sloth had a booth set up. I was able to interview them for an article, and I got to try Go-Go Town! a few hours before it was announced. That was more than three years ago, and it’s finally out on the Nintendo Switch 2. I’ve been looking forward to this game for a really long time, and for good reasons.
Go-Go Town! is a quirky and detailed town building game that’s a mix between Metropolismania and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. You’re tasked with becoming the Mayor of a small town and growing it into a bustling city. At the start of the story mode, you’re given a large plot of land to do whatever you want with. You can buy more land later on, and you can unlock various resources and features that give you complete control over how your town looks and operates.
You start the game with forest and mining zones where you collect resources. You use these resources to craft into other items or to build houses and storefronts. You can do everything yourself, but once you have a few residents, you can hire them to automate everything. You can set your workers to forage, craft, sell items, transport resources, and even clean the town for you. As you upgrade the town, you unlock more resources, buildings, and automation methods.
I love the logistics of city building games, but being able to automate everything on such a massive scale makes the game so much fun. After only a few hours, your town can be rather self-sufficient. One worker will get resources from the forest, farm, mines, or fishing areas. Other workers will deliver those resources to random stores across your town. Then the residents running each store will craft items and sell them.
At the start of the game, you only have access to a few storefronts. But as you progress, you unlock so many different types of stores to diversify the industries of your town. Plus you get to pick where literally everything goes. You get to decide what kind of houses your residents live in, where the stores go, and even what the roads themselves look like. At first I was putting everything near the train station for efficiency, but then I really started focusing on actually building up the city after about ten hours.
Eventually I created a little neighborhood that was where all the residents lived in their houses and apartments. I created a little downtown area where lots of stores were concentrated. I created random points of interest across the map and spent hours dictating how the city should look. Once I unlocked the train, the creativity went even further. But the building and logistics aspects are just one point of the game.
Unlike most city building games, you’re on the ground doing stuff. You’re riding around in a car or on a skateboard, checking in with all the tourists and seeing what they like or don’t like. Most tourists will walk around and buy items, which gives you more spending money. But some will give you a specific quest to complete that will get them to move in. But if you want to take a break from the logistics, you can spend hours decorating your house or collecting items to display in your museum. Want to just ride your bike through a bunch of tourists? Go for it.
The game doesn’t punish you for being a bad mayor. It’s a very loose game with lots of freedom and charm. The first few hours will be rather slow because you only have access to a few building types. But eventually the game evolves on such a grand scale. But if you don’t want the slow burn of progression, there’s a creative mode that gives you everything at once. Not only does Go-Go Town! have a lot to offer on the logistics side of things, the visuals are awesome and the game features a banger soundtrack. You should check out this game if you’re a fan of city building games but want the intimacy of something like Animal Crossing.
9/10