A few days before PAX East, I was browsing the list of exhibitors and noticed a familiar name. At the time, I couldn’t directly remember why I knew the name Prideful Sloth, but after looking them up, I was happy with the result. Way back in 2018, the last time that I was at PAX East, one of their games was on display and that game ended up becoming one of my most favorite games of all time.

That game is called Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles. Not only did I try the demo at the event, but I picked up a special edition version of the game for PS4. During the following week, I ended up enjoying the game so much that I went on to interview someone who helped distribute the game for a story that I did. The game became quite popular, getting a Switch release as well as an alternate cover. Prideful Sloth went on to develop a second game a few years later called Grow: Song of the Evertree, but today their newest game was announced.

The game is called Go-Go Town and it’s a wild blend of Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, and Sim City. The announcement was quite the surprise too because while the first official reveal was made at the Future Game Show. Prideful Sloth shadow dropped the demo in person at PAX East. At the event, the developers had their own booth to showcase the demo but they also had a spot in the PAX Rising Showcase.

In Go-Go Town, you become the mayor of a small town and you’re given full control over how the town is built. Once you have all the materials required to build something, you decide what type of building you want and you place it anywhere you want. Then you hire people to work at each building, converting all the resources you collected into items that bring in tourists. You can even automate the entire process by hiring people to do everything for you.

“It’s definitely a life-sim game,” said co-developer “But it’s also a tycoon game, you manage all the logistics of the town. You need to develop each industry and how you build them will determine how your tourists interact with the town. But even though you can automate everything with the tycoon function, you can still take a step back and do everything yourself if you wanted to, you can play the game any way you want.”

Being as this is the third game to be developed by Prideful Sloth, the team already has a lot of experience with making quality games and it’s shows in the Go-Go Town demo. Their first game was Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles, and it was very similar to the Go-Go Town premise as it’s a game that lets you do what you want at your own pace. Yonder had a unique charm and fantastic visuals paired with a non-existent combat system that made the game really easy to play.

Grow: Song of the Evertree isn’t all that different. The worlds of Grow maintain the high level of beauty that were present in Yonder while adding a robust sandbox feature that allows you to customize your world in any way you want. In a way, it’s like those mobile city builder games but with a full fledged open world adventure aesthetic.

Prideful Sloth then took the sandbox feature and expanded on it, tweaking it into what’s present in the Go-Go Town demo while also maintaining the charm and beauty of their first two games Their hope is that the game will be released in early 2024 and they’ll be on the hunt for community feedback throughout this year to ensure that the final product will be the best version possible.