Review | Button City

LifeisXbox’s Button City review | Fennel is new in Button City. The shy little fox quickly discovers the town has an arcade and makes some friends there, including a bunny in a wheelchair, a panda, and a cat that enjoys doing yoga to the sweet beats of metal music. Together, they form the Fluff Squad. The happy bunch soon sets out on an adventure to save the arcade from being shut down by the greedy fat cat Peppermint Pepperbottom. In this adventure game about friendship and community, we meet a cast of colorful animals, get to solve puzzles, and play arcade games. Sounds like a blast to me, so let’s dive in!

Button City was developed and published by Subliminal.

ℹ️ | We played Button City for over 5 hours on Xbox Series X. This game is also available on PC – Nintendo Switch – Xbox Series S – PlayStation 5

What we liked!

• Main and side quests | The main story took me about 5 hours to complete, which is a fair amount of time, in my opinion. Along the way, you’ll also be picking up side quests, and I really enjoyed these too! Find out the weather forecast for someone, pick up trash, or deliver letters to neighbours who are to scared to talk to each other in real life. There’s a wide variety of side quests available, and you can even continue them after you’ve finished the main story. There will be a quick end screen after you’ve completed the main quests, but after that you can just continue where you left off.
• Low poly art style | I am IN LOVE with the art style of Button City. It’s so very colorful, and the low poly graphics are totally my kind of thing! I read the sentence: ‘Enter a pastel diorama world inspired by 90’s nostalgia and filled with cute characters to befriend.‘ and I was sold. Pastel colors? 90’s nostalgia? Cute characters to befriend? Yes, please! I very much enjoyed the bright world of Button City, and getting to know all the characters. Every animal you meet has its own characteristics, and I especially loved the conspiracy-addict called (insert name). I had some good time with this fellow, haha!
• Mini games | You’ll be spending a significant amount of your gametime in the arcade. Luckily, you actually get to play the arcade games, which I thought was really cool! Sometimes, the story or a quest will require you to play a certain game, but you can just play them whenever you want, really. How awesome is that!
  • First of all, we have Gobabots where two teams of four fruit robots battle to make the biggest smoothie. You can buy Gogabots at the prize counter so you get better weapons and attacks, and then you’ll use that Gogabot to gather fruit and fight off bots from the other team.
  • The second mini game is rEVolution Racer, which is just a classic arcade racing game. It was a lot more difficult that I expected it to be, but very fun nonetheless! Drift to charge your batteries then unleash extreme boosts to speed past the competition!
  • And last, but not least, we have Prisma Beats, which is like a cute Just Dance game. You choose between two songs and hit the notes on the beat to show off your best dance moves. Additional songs can be bought in the music store, by the way! These mini games were a nice change from the quests, and I’m really glad the game offered this possibility.
• Story | The story revolves around Fennel and his friends trying to save the arcade from being shut down. On your trip, you’ll follow Pepperbottom around town, look for disguises, solve puzzles, and more. I ended up quite enjoying the heartwarming story about growing up, friendship, and releasing what’s important to you. It’s nothing too complicated, but it didn’t have to be. As I mentioned before, you get to know a bunch of characters that each have their own things to deal with, and I thought that was really cool. The conversations that you have with all the inhabitants are nice, hilarious, and just everything you want them to be.
  

Somewhere between

• A lot of going back and forward | The world of Button City is pretty cool. As you can see on the first screenshot, the different places in Button City are represented as floating squares above each other. So if you want to switch between them, you kind of just transport yourself to the diorama you need to go. I really enjoyed this system, it was quite easy to get the hang of as I never played a game like this before. Still, to fulfill quests, there was a lot of going back and forward between the dioramas and characters, so that sometimes felt a bit annoying. Like the side quests where you have to bring letters to neighbours, and you have to go upstairs, deliver the letter, go downstairs, answer a question, go back up and answer a new question, and so on. Quests usually don’t go on for too long, but still, I feel like people might get sick of this.

What we disliked

• Nothing here!

How long to beat the story | 5 hours
How long to achieve 1000G | TBD
Similar with | I’d say Animal Crossing, but it’s also very different!

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