Arcade Paradise preview: it’s the beginning of a retro game

If you ever find yourself stuck fixing a rusty and ramshackle laundromat owned by your father, the business mogul, who happens to be Geralt of Rivia voice actor Doug Cockle, you might consider beating the old man by secretly turning the whole thing into a Classic arcade in the style of the 1990s. If that is your thing, then you will be delighted to discover the next Arcade Paradise, a management sim in the Stardew Valley line that makes you run and manage your own arcade from zero.

But this is not just any management simulator. Not only will you run the laundry and arcade businesses side by side while managing each of your different revenue funnels, it looks like you will also be able to dive in and play all 50 of these fully realized arcade games.

Screenshots of Arcade Paradise

There’s a decent variety of cabinets to start with, like Video Air Hockey, a Candy Crush-style adventure game, and an F-Zero-like runner. But it’s great that you can add other non-gaming features, like a jukebox, which is filled with original retro 80s and retro 90s music.

However, expect it to take a little time before you get anywhere. When your arcade business is new and doesn’t generate much revenue as a result, your main business will be running wash cycles, flushing toilets, cleaning gum, and taking out the trash. At the end of each day, you’ll want to put your funds in a conveniently located back-room safe so you can shop for fancy updates and new game cabinets that arrive the next day, like clockwork. But be careful: if you stay at work too long instead of going home to get a good night’s rest, you may pass out, causing you to lose time at work the next day.

It’s not quite as fancy as the Stardew Valley loop, but it certainly adds a reason for you to keep track of the time via your nifty wristwatch, especially when planning wash cycles that can take several real-world minutes or several hours of playtime, to finish. It’s also worth mentioning that I didn’t see any other NPCs, and there doesn’t seem to be an option to hire employees to perform these basic tasks for you.

Towards the beginning of a new save, it seems like you can sink a minute or two at a time into a game cabinet while you wait for the wash cycles to finish automating, but since your main focus from the beginning is to lean on the laundromat side of your business for steady cash flow, you won’t be doing too much in the game room.

But you can expect things to get a lot more relaxed once you’ve shopped and collected enough different gaming cabinets.

Once that steady stream of arcade cash arrives, expect to give these arcade cabinets a lot more of your sustained focus, as you can take advantage of the passive income they generate while playing to your heart’s content, at least until you need to go home at the end. of the day. At this point, roughly two and a half hours after my preview session, I basically stopped paying attention to the wash cycles, instead racking up points on the surprisingly accurate tributes to Pac-Man and Grand Theft Auto.

As you play, work through a to-do list, and earn achievements, you can earn pounds on top of regular cash. If you want, you can log into your PC and spend those extra pounds on additional cosmetic benefits, but it’s all optional. It’s nice that you can also alter the different settings of each arcade cabinet, which changes the amount of profit it generates on its own.

The backroom PC is an efficient home base to add even more ’90s flavor to your game room. This is where you receive emails, where you can chat with your father and brother about how your business is progressing and where you will buy updates. In fact, this retro-style computer has a few more authentic tricks up its sleeve, with a Windows 95-like interface and even classic dial-up sounds to boot.

There is also a story to follow here, but at least in the first few hours, it seems like you will take a back seat to running and growing your business. The story that exists is enough to guide you through the process of learning everything you need to know, and Doug Cockle is entertaining in his role as a business dad, where he sometimes yells orders at him over the phone, but is only welcome.

In this first version, I found the keyboard and mouse controls to be a bit clunky and unclear, and I couldn’t find a menu where the keybindings were laid out. However, I found that connecting an Xbox Elite controller made Arcade Paradise much more enjoyable to play overall. Button layout is simpler; for example, you just need to press and hold the Y button to exit your PC or arcade cabinet. Whereas, relying on my keyboard and mouse settings, I was stuck in an arcade cabinet for an entire working day on the game.

Since I’m playing with a preview version, this is all subject to change, especially when it comes to quality of life features. But after spending over three hours exploring just a handful of these authentically designed arcade cabinets, I can confidently say that Arcade Paradise promises a surprising amount of variety and depth thus far. Overall, it seems like there are still quite a few arcade features and cabinets that I didn’t get a chance to see, but I’m excited to give Arcade Paradise a proper dive when it launches later this year.