GOTY 2018 – Number 4 – Go Vacation

(Song in the video is Sista Moosesha [Instrumental] by Masaya Matsuura)
I’ve been looking forward to doing this for a long time.

Let me open this by clarifying why the Nintendo Switch release of Go Vacation is a suitable candidate for one of my GOTY lists. Go Vacation is a sequel to the Wii’s Family Ski series. These are very iterative titles, and much of Go Vacation’s Snow Resort is pulled straight from that original Family Ski game. It doesn’t matter that a good 95% of the Switch Go Vacation’s content is taken straight from a Wii game I played the best part of a decade ago – By this series’ criteria, Switch Go Vacation is a new game. And what a game it is.

Think of your most personally fulfilling moments in some of your favourite open world games. I bet they weren’t about beating up pedestrians or unlocking some trophy. I bet your best moments were taking in golden sunsets and feeling entirely at peace with the world presented to you. That’s what Go Vacation’s about.

For a game easily dismissed as a third-party Wii Sports knock-off, the content on offer is refreshingly open to what a wildly diverse playerbase would want to focus on. You can play Go Vacation solely as a four-player minigame collection and get more than your money’s worth. For me, Go Vacation is mostly a relaxing open-world game with deviously hidden secrets, skateboarding, horse riding, nature photography and Ridge Racer. It’s no wonder I’m so enamored with the thing, but the range of content is so wide that I’m sure most people could find content that seems uniquely appealing to them and just focus on that. Did you find Red Dead Redemption II too tedious and repetitive? Step away from the crowd and get your head in some Go Vacation.

All of this was true for the Wii game too, but the biggest difference in the Switch release is the controls. Wii Go Vacation was still very tied to its roots as a light-hearted skiing game, which had overriding influence on how you controlled most of its vehicles. There was also mandatory motion-controls spread all over the game. The Switch game hasn’t gone fully towards the core market and ditched them entirely, but when using a pair of joycon or a Pro Controller, motion controls are typically limited to doing a quick shake to perform moves on skateboards and the like. It’s still not 100% ideal for the audience approaching this as a peaceful alternative to GTA rather than a more fleshed-out alternative to Wii Sports, but it’s a giant leap in the right direction.

I think the thing I like most about Go Vacation is how lovingly crafted its locations are. They’re full of hidden secrets and areas that seem completely locked-off at first, but with thorough exploration and experimentation, are entirely accessible. It’s something that made GTA3 and Vice City so compelling to pick apart, but the focus on this aspect has more in common with classic N64 platformers and Tony Hawk’s before it got too user-friendly. It’s something of a bygone concept in modern games design, but Go Vacation made me realise how much I missed it. If you want something that makes you feel like you did when you started to go wild over videogames, I think there’s a strong case that Go Vacation could be that precise thing.

It’s something that made me feel like I’d never played enough of the game, back on the Wii, but on the Switch, with its lack of set up, instant accessibility and more sensible controls, I feel like I’ve finally been able to explore the game fully. It’s been a real treat for me.

That’s just speaking in relative terms, of course, because the game is huge. Almost every activity has several levels within them, and though not every one of them is a winner, there’s plenty that I like quite a bit and haven’t really played much of. A lot of them are secret low-key remakes of unique games like GTI Club and FourTrax. This is a family game at it’s core, but they’ve paid as much attention to keeping dad entertained as Sonny Jim.

I recommended Go Vacation when it was an eccentric, hard-to-play Wii game. Now it’s expanded on the Switch, I can’t bang on about it enough. Just make sure you really give it the attention it deserves. It’s a secret classic.