If you ever find yourself stuck sprucing up a rusty, beaten-down laundromat owned by your business mogul dad — who just happens to be Geralt of Rivia voice actor Doug Cockle — you might consider sticking it to the old man by secretly converting the entire thing into a classic 1990s-style arcade. If that’s up your alley, then you’ll be pleased as fruit punch to discover the upcoming Arcade Paradise, a management sim in the vein of Stardew Valley that has you running and managing your very own arcade from the ground up.
But this isn’t just any management sim. Not only will you run the laundromat and arcade businesses side-by-side as you manage each of your different funnels of income, it sounds like you’ll also get to dive into and play all 50 of these fully-realized arcade games.
There are a decent variety of cabinets to start with, like Video Air Hockey, a Candy Crush-style adventure game, and an F-Zero-like racer. But it’s cool that you can add other non-gaming features, such as a jukebox, which is full of retro-80s and retro-90s-themed original music.
Expect it to take a little while before you get anywhere, however. When your arcade venture is brand new and doesn’t generate much revenue as a result, your main hustle will boil down to running laundry cycles, unclogging toilets, cleaning up gum, and taking out the trash. At the end of each day, you’ll want to place your funds into a conveniently-located safe in the backroom office so you can buy sleek renovations and new arcade cabinets that arrive the next day, like clockwork. But watch out — if you stay at work for too long instead of going home to get a good night’s rest, you can pass out, which makes you miss time at work the next day.
It’s not as sophisticated as Stardew Valley’s loop, but it certainly adds a reason for you to keep an eye on the time via your nifty wrist watch — especially when planning out laundry cycles that can take several real-world minutes, or several in-game hours, to complete. It’s also worth mentioning that I didn’t see any other NPCs, and it doesn’t seem like there’s an option to hire employees to run these basic tasks for you.
Towards the beginning of a fresh save, it seems like you’re able to sink a minute or two at a time into an arcade cabinet while you wait for laundry cycles to finish automating, but since your main focus early on is leaning on the laundromat side of your business for steady cash flow, you won’t be doing too much in the arcade.
But you can expect things to become much more relaxed once you’ve purchased and collected enough different arcade cabinets.
Once that steady inflow of arcade money comes in, expect to give these arcade cabinets far more of your sustained focus, since you can ride on the passive income that they generate while you play to your heart’s content — at least until you need to go home at the end of the day. At this point, about two and a half hours into my preview session, I basically stopped paying attention to laundry cycles at all — instead, racking up points in the surprisingly accurate homages to Pac-Man and Grand Theft Auto.
As you play games, work your way through a to-do list, and score achievements, you can earn pounds in addition to regular cash. If you’d like to, you can then log into your PC and spend these neat pounds on extra cosmetic benefits, but it’s all optional. It’s nice that you can also alter the different settings of each arcade cabinet, which changes how much profit it generates on its own.
The PC in your backroom office is an effective base of operations that serves to add even more 1990s flavor to your arcade. This is where you receive emails, where you can chat with your dad and sibling about how your business is progressing, and where you’ll shop for upgrades. In fact, this retro-style computer has a few extra authentic tricks up its sleeve, coming in hot with a Windows 95-esque interface and even featuring classic dial-up sounds to boot.
There’s a story to follow here, too, but in the first few hours at least, it seems like it’ll take a back seat to managing and building 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 business dad, where he sometimes shouts orders at you over the phone but doesn’t overstay his welcome.
In this early build, I found that the keyboard and mouse controls were a bit rough and unclear, and I couldn’t find a menu where the keybinds were laid out. However, I found that plugging in an Xbox Elite Controller made Arcade Paradise far more enjoyable to play overall. The button layout is simpler; for example, you only need to hold the Y button in order to exit your PC or arcade cabinet. Whereas, relying on my keyboard and mouse setup, I got stuck in an arcade cabinet for an entire in-game workday.
Given that I’m playing with a preview build, this is all subject to change, especially including the quality of life features. But after spending over three hours exploring only a mere 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 sounds like there are still quite a few features and arcade 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.
