| Our score | 8.5 / 10 |
| The good | Huge amount of content packed into a fun tycoon game |
| The bad | Some arcade games aren’t that fun |
| Publication date | August 11, 2022 |
| Developed by | Nosebleed Interactive |
| Available on | PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC, Switch |
| Judged by | PS5 |
The premise of Arcade Paradise, set in the early 1990s, is this: you graduate and are in charge of Dad’s laundromat. He is a strict businessman and he wants you to take some responsibility by taking over one of the family businesses: the King Wash laundromat. The only problem is… Laundromats aren’t fun and since you’re a business graduate you realize that the arcade machines lumped together in a storage room to give customers something to do while washing their underwear, have great potential to make money.
But daddy doesn’t care about video games. He thinks they are a waste of time, and he urges you to get on with the task ahead and fold those clothes and put those dead presidents in the vault.
Obviously, since the game is called Arcade Paradise, you go against the grain and take the initiative and turn the dingy little laundromat into a haven for gamers with a collection of the sweetest arcade games known from 1993. An Arcade Paradise, if you want.
It’s a long journey, though, and surprisingly I liked the mundane business of the company more than playing arcade games, at least to begin with. As the progress accelerated and the money started trickling in at a faster rate, I spent less and less time in the dirty laundry.
I started each day with a quick run around the property to clean up all the mess customers had left before going back and throwing it in the bins. This in itself is a game where you have to time your roll to hit a trash can, which in turn puts $30 in your pocket. In fact, most minor menial tasks are a great way to make some bucks. See a blob of chewing game spoiling a chair? Beat the minigame and complete it quickly to get a nice small cash reward. Toilet clogged? Arm yourself with the plunger and battle it out to the bowl for a quick cash flow.
Playing the arcade games may seem like a departure from work, but you are actually encouraged to play them.
The big bucks, at least while the arcade is just a dingy storage area, comes from serving the customers by dumping their clothes in the washing machine, waiting for the cycle to finish, then transferring them to the dryer. . A fast turnaround time can be the difference between an S-Rank score and $30 in your pocket and a C-Rank with just a small five for your effort, or lack thereof.
It may sound simple, but you can’t just sit and watch the washing machines run. What else is there to do? That’s where those dinky cabinets come into play. Or you can make Dad proud and just watch the washing machines.
Playing the arcade games may seem like a departure from work, but you are actually encouraged to play them. Each game has a certain number of objectives that you must complete, and completing each objective will increase the popularity of the game, which in turn increases the amount of income the machine will bring in each day. More money in the treasury means you can buy more slots and even expand the arcade by breaking through adjacent walls, turning the uninviting dark back room into a glowing center of money machines.
The steady flow of money leads to a steady flow of new games for the arcade, as well as upgrades that make running a business easier. It’s that loop that kept me playing for hours on end, sometimes to the point where I almost fell asleep with the controller in my hand. Something about the soft hum of a clothes dryer just sends me off to dreamland.
If I had to focus any criticism on Arcade Paradise, it would be on some of the games and their goals. By completing game goals you can earn more money, but some of them are just too hard. I tried making “gud” in Zombat 2, a top-down zombie shooter, but I just couldn’t, even after adjusting the difficulty on my trusty 90s PDA. Another early addition to the library, Blockchain, had mesmerized by its confusing Tetris-style number-based layout. I must have put in a good half hour at this point and I still have no idea what I’m doing.
Thankfully most of the games are pretty good and once the company got to the point where I could kind of ignore the laundry side and focus on the arcade and maintenance I really started investing in some of the games that I’d had my arcade filled and essentially let the business run itself. That’s the dream, isn’t it?
Arcade Paradise lives up to its name by being essentially a modern plug-n-play TV compilation (remember?), wrapped in a competent and rewarding business sim, dressed in the flashiest fashion of the 90s, complete with dial-up internet, PC Solitaire, and more turquoise tracksuits than I’d ever want to see. The collection of games on offer is huge, and the earn-buy-earning loop works well to prevent the game from getting too old too quickly.
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