Go-Go Town! is a cosy Animal Crossing-like from the developers of Yonder
Make the residents work for you
Go-Go Town! has more than a little Animal Crossing about it, as players become mayor of a cutesy fixer-upper town and start doing oddjobs to attract new visitors and inhabitants. It differs in several key ways too, thankfully, from its more urban setting, its tactile power tools, and the ability to automate a lot of the gathering and crafting by putting residents to work for you. Watch the reveal trailer below.
It's mostly an animation, but there's more of the game in action near the end:
There's also more to see in a looping stream at the top of the Go-Go Town! Steam page, which shows an early sandbox demo. As a new mayor, you'll need to gather resources - wood, stone, and so on - and then render them into materials like bricks or planks. With those, you can construct buildings and choose which sorts of businesses move in. Those businesses have their own supply chain needs, which you can then fulfill with more gathering and upcycling.
When that becomes too overwhelming to manage alone, you can put the townspeople to work, assigning them not only to staff those businesses but to gather, process and deliver resources.
I've punched and drilled a lot of trees in my life, but there's a tactility to all the actions in Go-Go Town! Developers Prideful Sloth say that one of their design rules was "no magic pockets"; items you collect are visible in a box on your character's back, not spirited away to a separate inventory screen. It's almost Astroneer-like.
Prideful Sloth are no strangers to crafting sandboxes, having released Grow: Song Of The Evertree in 2021. They also made Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles, a combat-free Zelda 'em up that was lovely. Congratulations to them for not sticking a colon and subtitle on Go-Go Town!.
Go-Go Town! is apparently aiming for release in late 2023, although they say they're showing it this early in part to get feedback before they're too far along in development.