Arcade Paradise (2022)

Playtime: 3 hours (unlocked daily quests)

Intro

In Arcade Paradise you wash clothes, clean the mess and play bad versions of existing games.

Review

This is a truly awful game and weirdly reminiscent of Secret Of The Magic Crystals. You do menial tasks and then your "reward" is a crappy version of Pacman. Oh yeah, if you leave the game you're playing to fix the toilet or because it's mandatory bedtime it wipes your progress. Yay!

Of course, being a shop sim you're not allowed to customise anything. At least, not in the first three hours. The game looks like a mid 2000s release with horrifying creatures that vaguely resemble humans:

Once you get far enough you get daily quests that can only be completed on the day you get them. They're grindy and awful, of course:

As a reward for doing these you get some truly awful rewards like making the already endless days last longer:

And yes, all management is done through the awful PDA and a bizarre Windows 95 with bonus awful cursor that just broke at some point.

Worst of all is how laundry is by far the best way to make money early on but washing and drying are both on 3 minute timers and there's no way to speed this up and the game pauses when you leave its window. It's laughable that they call this a management game.

Firstly, this was going to be a 100% achievement hunt for me, but 2 of my arcade high score achievements have glitched and I can't retrigger - so I think I'm done with the game. Overall I loved the arcade games - even the ones I didn't jive with and the sheer quantity and variety is impressive

Pros :

• Zombat2, Blockchain, Stack Overflow, and Grafitti Ballz are incredible games and I would pay money for blockchain on the phone.
• Even the games I didn't enjoy playing (pac-man clone I'm looking at you) had incredibly clever ideas applied to them.
• The story was fun and heartfelt
• The music was stand out

Cons :

• The arcade management gets old VERY quickly. It would have been more fun to have idle mechanics applied to it rather than being a chore.
• To-Do lists seem to be very Darts heavy and Darts is one of the worst games
• Upgrades are a bit obtuse and somettimes I spent money on things that were worthless (shoes and glasses)

Booted this up on Gamepass yesterday thinking it was just a room of arcade games to play and I'm not sure I'm more/less happy with what it actually is - an arcade manager with a cute story with unique arcade games.

I'm a sucker for to-do lists in games, so it was hard to know whether I was engaged or just ticking off my todo lists, internal game achievements, or actual platform achievements.

I do find the arcade games a bit hit or miss. Blockchain is far and away my favorite, with a unique puzzle mechanic, and while I don't love their version of pac-man - it is very novel in it's approach to on-foot pursuit.

I'll probably stop engaging with the laundry part of the game soon as it was not fun to be alerted to laundry issues while playing an arcade game. Hopefulyl I unlock a freeplay mode soon.

Arcade Paradise is a game that lets you run your own arcade business in the 90s. You start with a rundown laundromat and a single arcade machine, and you have to work hard to earn money and buy more machines. Along the way, you can play over 35 different arcade games, each with its own retro style and gameplay.

The game is a very creative idea, and it has very creative takes on some classic arcade games. I really enjoyed seeing the different games that they had created to fill my virtual arcade. I thought Stack Overflow and Graffiti Ballz were my two favorites. Stack Overflow is a puzzle game where you have to stack blocks of different colors, like the towers of Hanoi, as fast as possible. Graffiti Ballz is a pinball style game where you have to create colored balls by bouncing like colors into each other.

One thing I didn’t like so much about the game was how near the end, I grew disinterested in playing the arcade games, and treated the game more like an “idler” game, where I was just earning money passively while I was working or watching TV. I also thought that some of the repetitive “activities” were a bit too repetitive and I just grew tired of doing them. For example, you have to clean the machines, take out the trash, and clean the toilet. These tasks are not very fun or challenging, and they get boring after a while.

There were also some graphical and gameplay bugs that were annoying. For instance, sometimes the machines would glitch out and not work properly, or your arms would get stuck out at weird angles, or the game would lock up occasionally requiring a full reset. The game could use some more polish and optimization to fix these issues.

All in all, I give the game 4 stars because it was a really great idea and they exhibited such creativity in all of the arcade game clones. It was fun to relive the nostalgia of the 90s arcade scene, and to see how far you can grow your business. The game has a lot of potential, but it also has some flaws that need to be addressed. If you are looking for a unique and quirky simulation game with a lot of variety, Arcade Paradise might be for you.

I almost lost my mind trying to get the best score on the gopher bopping one. I'm glad I didn't feel pushed to play all the games, because some of them were not my thing, but I liked a lot of them. My favorite was probably Woodgal Jr.

Also, the story was pretty good for a game like this where I wouldn't expect the writing to matter in any way! So that's nice.

I have to give this one five stars because its so nice and good at what it manages to do: Bring you a full arcade full of quality retro games you can play at your leisure once you complete the game. The only trouble is, you do have to work for it! However, that's not so bad and it's about just the right length. The games themselves also come with 3-5 challenges you can complete (completely optional but VERY satisfying on some of the games)

I do like devs who make retro games with new twists. These are like streamlined and most are not outright clones (though a few, and several just combine maybe 1-2 new elements) The games range in difficulty some are much easier than others. Blockchain is one VERY intersting game to find in something like this. Once I figured it out, I was really hooked and enjoying it.

taking off one star for the sports games which need some work (the physics in pool is quite bad, arkanoid clone also has janky physics) and some of the filler-ish content in managing your arcade. (choosing wrong upgrades nets you useless items that translates into spending even more time getting pounds to purchase the useful upgrades) other than these minor things its pretty much perfect with a suprisingly cool intro and ending even.

I'll keep this lying around because i know i'll want to revisit the space race simulator, Graffitti Ballz, and ZOMBAT 2. These I feel are some of the better games in Arcade Paradise and they are excellent.