Button City

If you expect a cute short story with adorable characters, then this is what you'll get. And don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed this part of the experience, as well as the wholesome chunky graphics. But the rest of the game is pretty... meh? It's really, and I mean REALLY, slow. Even your character moves slowly without any sprint button, which is especially noticeable in locations like apartments or an arcade, where you need to get up the stairs or up and down on an elevator. And there is no beautiful scenery that you need to slowly enjoy. You manually slowly move your camera, because things like doors or characters are usually somewhere offscreen or behind another object. And when camera moved by itself (like during or after the cutscenes), it made me motion sick. For you to slowly change the location tile you need to be outside and in the starting point of that location. Which means that in an arcade, for example, you need to get back to the other side of the second floor, click on the elevator, wait to go down, run through the whole room to the door, click on it, wait and only then go through the tiles, probably accidentally skipping the one you need. In the park you can't open your tiles even if you are in the OUTSIDE PART of the hideout, you need specifically be near the playground. Most of the quests are either "go to the other side of the room, say this to that character and then go back to me so we can repeat that process" or "exit 3 rooms, go to that tile, run to the end of it, get into the building, find that thing and backtrack all the way back to me, only for me to give you another quest IN THE SAME PLACE YOU WERE IN BEFORE SPENDING 3 MINUTES TO RUN BACK". And I'm not even talking about side quests, where you need to talk to some character, whose name you don't remember at all, so you need to run around, talking to everyone and just hoping one of them will be some kind of blended together in your head spice or herb name that you need. I originally thought that this game is just a bunch of minigames or arcades, where you challenge characters on rock-paper-scissors and things like that. But it's not. In the end there are only 3 and a half minigames: rhythm-game, race, lemonade stand and a main one about fighting and collecting more fruits then another team. None of them are particularly good. Rhythm-game is really clunky, so I, as a vivid rhythm-games enjoyer, didn't beat even a first opponent and gave up on that one. All races are held on the same exact map that you will get tired of on the third lap. They are boring and really easy, especially as soon as you realize that you can just hold a speed up button and constantly drift from side to side. Lemonade stand is whatever, it gets repetitive really fast, so I actually played it like 1-2 times. And a competitive game is pretty unfair: your teammate's AI is stupid and ruin half of the matches, while the opponent team is always together and just ambush you 4 on 1 when you are running to the blender. Controls in this minigame are clunky, you often miss and even if not you still barely deal any damage. It's always held on the same map with the same fruit placements and the same team sides (except 1 time), so it's not really challenging and still is boring. Dragging through those minigames to get buttons is a chore. I've encountered a lot of softlocking and regular bugs, that forced me to alt + f4 the game and lose my latest progress. Every time when I closed the game and opened it again it was on 0% volume for some reason and my accessories were taken off. I still 100% the game and the story about childhood adventures is something I personally really enjoy in my media, so I guess it says something. Would I recommend Button City? Not really, no, but you can always try it for yourself (seems like at least people on Steam really enjoyed it).