Button City

My first instinct with Button City was to forgive everything the moment I saw those pastel diorama locations. Subliminal, a small indigenous-owned studio out of Albuquerque, built something that looks genuinely unlike most things on Steam: low-poly animal characters with Animal Crossing-adjacent expressiveness, fluorescent colours that feel hand-chosen rather than procedurally pleasing, and a diorama traversal system called Zoomie that lets you teleport between locations by rotating a tiny patch of town in your hands. That tactile framing device alone communicates what this game is trying to do. It wants you to feel like a kid holding a toy, not a gamer chasing a platinum. The story follows Fennel, a shy fox new in town, who stumbles into the local arcade and gets drafted into a four-player crew called the Fluff Squad to compete in Gobabots, the arcade's flagship team game. Gobabots is the most developed of the three playable arcade titles: a 4v4 arena game where you collect fruit from trees and deposit it into a central smoothie machine while KO-ing opponents to slow them down. You can unlock up to twelve different Gobabots characters, each with their own attacks and special moves. Alongside it sit rEVolution Racer, a pastel drift-heavy racing game with only one base track, and Prisma Beats, a rhythm game with DDR-style button inputs. The rhythm game's input clarity is a genuine problem, particularly on controller, and the racing game gets thin fast because the single track's modifiers, things like dropped boost items or cosmetic mustaches on your car, can only stretch the content so far. If you come to Button City primarily for its in-universe arcade, you will feel the ceiling quickly. The narrative, though, is where the studio's craft shows. Your three core friends, Sorrel, Lavender, and Chive, each carry personal storylines with more texture than the premise suggests: Lavender wrestles with embarrassment over her Gobabots cosplay hobby, while Sorrel insists on doing yoga to death metal. The broader story, a community banding together against a wealthy cat developer named Peppermint Pepperbottom who wants to replace the arcade with a mall, plays its familiar tropes completely straight, and the sincerity is what lands. Critics who praised the game consistently pointed to the dialogue as the standout, describing the cast as genuinely fleshed-out rather than functional. The issue is the quest design wrapping all of that good writing: the game leans hard on fetch quest structure, and some chains send you back and forth between the same few points without much payoff. The writing earns those trips more often than not, but not always. Bug reports at launch were significant, including some softlocks and quest-trigger failures that could block completionists entirely. Steam's player base, while small in sample size, has settled at a very positive rating over time, suggesting patches addressed the worst of it. The runtime lands around six to eight hours depending on how long you spend in the arcade or hunting collectibles and costumes, which feels right. Button City knows roughly when to end, and that matters more than people give it credit for. If you read this and the minigame criticism sounds like a dealbreaker, it probably is. But if you are the kind of player who genuinely values quiet, character-driven storytelling in a world that looks like someone spent real time caring about every polygon, the rough edges around the arcade games are survivable. This is comfort food made by a small team with real intent, and that intent comes through in almost every scene that does not involve racing or rhythm. Approach it as a short narrative adventure with arcade distractions rather than an arcade game with a story bolted on, and it gives back something warm.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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