British developer Nosebleed Interactive is interested in clashing juxtapositions, especially what happens when you jam classic current arcade games against the long-term and slow build-up of the management genre. 2017’s Vostok Inc. was an unholy but fruitful marriage of twin-stick shooter and exponential clicker in the name of galactic domination, and the two flavors turned out to be more complementary than you might think.
Now the studio gives us Arcade Paradise – which is now available on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch. It’s a management game where you turn a shabby laundromat with a few arcade machines in the back into a video game paradise, and all the cabinets you can buy are fully playable, original creations. (Well, pretty original, but I’ll get to that.) This game is simultaneously more ambitious and more mundane than Vostok Inc.and it explores some more awkward tensions between its two halves.
The time frame is an unspecified period between 1987 and 2002 that somehow manages to be all those years at once. The menu is a monochromatic PalmPilot-esque with a stylus, there’s a chunky dial-up PC with instant messaging software on it, and the games range from vintage 8-bit to early 3D. You’re a 19-year-old layabout and your self-made father has put you in charge of one of his businesses, a laundromat, in the hopes that it will make something of you. Of course you would rather make something out of it: namely a flourishing arcade. But you’ll have to do it behind your disapproving father’s back.
There is a lot of printing. The laundromat, where you wander in first person, generates the income you need to build out the arcade and needs maintenance. It’s an endless grind of loading and unloading washing machines and dryers, taking out the garbage, unblocking the toilet and repairing broken machines. The more of this you do, and the more efficient, the more money you can bank up to invest in slot machines. It’s satisfying to an extent, but it’s not really fun. It’s work, and it should feel like work.
Managing the arcade, which is done through your PalmPilot, is a more sophisticated affair. Each individual machine has a popularity rating, which is influenced by things like difficulty, price, room cleanliness, and proximity to other popular machines. You can adjust the difficulty and price per game, as well as placement, to try and optimize the profitability of each slot. Crucially, you can increase the popularity of a game by playing it. Each cabin comes with a series of achievement-style objectives that, when completed, will draw more players into the game. So you’re incentivized to play for work as well as for fun, which makes sense – after all, know your product.
I’ve only played a few hours and sampled a handful of the 35 or so cabinets you can buy, but I already have a sense of how Nosebleed’s deep love of classic gaming is warmly and wittily expressed. Some games are funny, well-realized pastiches of classics like pong or Mr Driller; some are mashups like the game gives Pac-Man a Grand Theft Auto reupholster. Some nail the surreal, disposable, half-two, half-crazy innocence of early gaming: one game about having a job in a packaging warehouse, and another — a savagely immersive three-on-one puzzle game called The Adventure of Woodgal – about fighting slime and baking cakes. They all play out as the kind of well-intentioned counterfeits from talented bedroom programmers who used to fill computer store shelves and get half of the gaming industry started (especially in the home computer-obsessed UK in the 1980s).
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23937584/ArcadeParadiseScreenshot02.jpg)
Image: Nosebleed Interactive/Wired Productions
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23937585/Arcade_Paradise_Screenshot_01.png)
Image: Nosebleed Interactive/Wired Productions
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23937588/Arcade_Paradise_Screenshot_07.png)
Image: Nosebleed Interactive/Wired Productions
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23937586/ArcadeParadiseScreenshot_Spacerace.jpg)
Image: Nosebleed Interactive/Wired Productions
Arcade Paradise is about balancing the seductive appeal of a new attempt at these machines against the squeaky memories of unloading the washing machines again. Play too much, and your income withers, but play too little, and the arcade will never become as popular as it could be. You need the revenue from the laundromat to build out the arcade, but at some point you have to switch from grinding in the present to focusing on the future. What is the purpose of this game anyway? Enjoy, or collect money to buy games you don’t have time for? (Sounds familiar.)
Besides a love letter to the arcade from the 90s, Arcade Paradise is a game about work-life balance, and also the balance between different types of work: the work you do for survival and the work you do for love. Like all management games, it’s inherently about capitalism, but in a way that’s both spiky and softer than the satirical, machine-based emptiness of clicker games like Vostok Inc. This one is about how to live within the system and how to use it to build something beautiful.
Arcade Paradise was released on August 11 on Windows PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Nintendo Switch. The game has been reviewed on PC using a pre-release download code provided by Nosebleed Interactive. Vox Media has affiliated partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commission on products purchased through affiliate links. you can find additional information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy here.
0 Comments