PAX East 2023: Go-Go Town Preview

At PAX East 2023, I had the chance to play about 30 minutes of Go-Go Town, a new IP from developer Prideful Sloth, and speak with the Game Director Joel Styles. We sat down together on the show floor to play Go-Go Town as Styles talked me through everything you could do in the game, from chopping down trees to mining rocks to riding bicycles.

It’s clear that Go-Go Town is a labor of love, and was designed to bring hours of enjoyment to those looking for the next great life-sim experience. 

Terraforming Is the Name of the Game in Go-Go Town

Similar to games like Animal Crossing, Go-Go Town allows you to change up the look and feel of your village. That means you can gather resources and build structures to fit the style of what you want your village to look like. The buildings are just the first step though, as you then need to decide what role they’ll occupy in the game. 

“The building doesn’t define the task or a role, the building is just a space. So you have to fit it out with what its role is, who works there, and what it produces,” Styles said. 

Different spaces can support different roles, so whether you want to open up a fast-food restaurant, a fish market, or any of the other dozens of options — you can! Go-Go Town was developed with the understanding that life-sim games eventually reach a point where players no longer have a reason to come back. The team at Prideful Sloth are working to make Go-Go Town be a game that is always offering something new, even if that means building a long-range communication device to contact aliens so that they can visit your town. 

During my 30-minute Go-Go Town preview, I got a taste of some of the build and management mechanics. This game is the epitome of a relaxing life-sim: I ran around a forest chopping down trees, and I explored a small mine where I harvested rocks and deposited them into a machine to turn them into bricks. With my new materials, I was able to build a structure that I designated as a fast-food restaurant and assigned a villager to manage it. 

With that out of the way, I ran around the town and checked out everything it had to offer, including the satellite dish in the corner that I was able to use to contact aliens. To my surprise, a flying saucer descended from the heavens and dropped a group of happy, curious aliens into my town. With some of the key jobs like collecting resources delegated to my villagers, I was able to just have fun riding bicycles, driving cars, and becoming more familiar with all the existing structures in this demo build. 

Want to Play with a Friend? Go-Go Town Supports Couch Co-Op!

What would a town-building game be without friends? Go-Go Town offers drop-in couch co-op so that friends and family can work together on a single village: gathering resources, building roads, outfitting structures, and so much more. There isn’t currently a plan to be able to use an internet connection to drop into other people’s towns, but local multiplayer will be supported. 

To kick things off, Go-Go Town will be available on Steam and Nintendo Switch, but Prideful Sloth will be looking to expand and release on other platforms as well. Be sure to keep an eye out for the Go-Go Town release date and see when you can start building once this game goes live!

Go-Go Town was previewed at PAX East 2023.