I mostly played this game on the Xbox One when it was on Game Pass and had this in my library for a while so I decided to play it on Steam. Starting over kinda sucks because the game play goes by slowly you can get better things and upgrades later so you need to keep playing to enjoy it more.

The start is very rough because you want more time to play the arcade machines but if you have time to kill and like the vibe of the the grungy/retro aesthetics this game can be cool.

Starting over again kinda makes it hard to keep playing so I might have to just finish it on my console. The concept is cool and I feel like I'm in a different time. It's not for everyone but if you enjoy nostalgia with time management and doing multiple tasks at once then there is a good chance you will enjoy this game.👾💙🕹️

Have you ever wanted to play a game within a game within a game? No, it's not Mise en abyme, but it makes me think of recursion, and within this game there are definitely stories within stories that make the value for money go sky-high!
Tedium? That would be your own fault, and the laundry is a joke (to be vague 🔐) + I praise the developer for wrongfully advertising their game — rather as work than play?!

9.1337/10 — Extra fun with/against friends! Some arcade games really deserve to be released stand-alone!

A massively underrated game. More polished than "The Coin Game" by far, and even a bit more polished than "Tower Unite" which is also great. The fact that this game has so few positive reviews compared to "The Coin Game' is a massive injustice.

(Ignore playtime; I've obtained all achievements offline and nearly did the same on Xbox as well.)

Keep in mind that this entire review is written from the perspective of a compulsive completionist...and this game has nearly cured that tendency. I no longer feel this drive to obtain every achievement in a game.

While I'm going to recommend this, it's only a very passive, half-hearted recommendation, like 51% leaning towards "yes." I think Arcade Paradise is a fun novelty that should be enjoyed VERY casually and not as an achievement hunter, for one simple reason:

The more I played this game, the less I liked it, and dramatically so -- far more than any other game I've fully finished.

It has a lot of strengths:

1. Some of the minigames are pretty great, and are actually better than Arcade Paradise as a whole. I would pay money for an expanded standalone Zombat.

2. I love that many of the games are combinations of designs of classics -- e.g. Racer Chaser is the aesthetic of Grand Theft Auto 1 with the gameplay of Pac-Man. What a great idea.

3. I love (in theory) every machine having its own set of goals or mini-achievements. There's a lot to do here, and gives each machine more life than its actual 5-minute runtime. This is, on paper, a completionist's dream -- but see below.

4. The 90's aesthetic (which is really an 80's aesthetic with kinda-90's technology) is a lot of fun and something I wish we saw more in games. I love the 90's.

5. The option to switch between managerial and physical labor in the early game was a great idea, and ensures nothing becomes boring for the first 5-10 hours. Like many, I kind of wish you could expand the laundromat rather than the arcade.

But here, I think, are the major fundamental problems with Arcade Paradise:

1. (Story) Ashley is an awful protagonist and a terrible person, and I unapologetically hate her. I know the game wants you to care about her plight with her overly-mean, mustache-twirly rich businessman of a father, but she really is hijacking his laundromat and illegally changing its function. You know, if you hired the Assistant Manager upgrade and he suddenly decided the arcade would be better as a clothing store without your permission, people would lose their minds and refund the game, but that's exactly what Ashley does here. It doesn't help that she's so snide and her father acts like some evil emperor the entire game; the psychological slingshot effect actually makes me want him to win in the end. It's a terrible combination of shallow sympathy and a money-ruins-people mentality (unless it's being made by us, of course).

2. Removing the laundry at the end (while generally good) creates a new problem: After this point, the arcade is little more than a schizophrenic, fragile gallery of mini games. It's no longer a business simulator and instead becomes an electronic babysitting job. Imagine playing House Flipper except you lose the ability to flip houses and spend all your time trying to contain cockroaches -- which is quite literally what happens here.

2a. After removing the laundromat the game still gives you many daily tasks involving laundry, rendering an achievement involving successive days of completed tasks pretty difficult unless you do it early on. It's a small but not insignificant oversight.

3. The game does everything in its power to interrupt your fun. Just starting to make good progress on a machine? Time to unclog the toilet! Enjoying the laundry mechanic? Too bad, a machine's hopper is full! This crap happens CONSTANTLY and interrupts you even more often later despite upgrades to supposedly avoid such problems. Worse, when you've completely maxed out the business side of things and money is irrelevant, you still have to deal with the occasional barrage of notifications about the toilet and broken machines even when ignoring them.

4. Machines breaking down almost single handedly ruins the game. You will literally have 5+ arcade machines break down EVERY DAY, and that's with the upgrade to diminish breakdowns. Eventually I just stopped repairing them and had a whole arcade full of error screens, only fixing games I was about to play.

5. A significant portion of the games are reskins of other games. Pong is Air Hockey is Video Hockey. I know Woodgal Jr. and Woodguy Jr. are supposed to be a reference to Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, but it doesn't change the fact that they're the same game.

6. While each game having its own set of Goals/Achievements is overall good, a large portion of the goals are overkill and will ask you to play far longer than you'd ever want. E.G. I hope you enjoy Pong, because you're going to spend like 45 minutes just grinding out matches. (I don't know about you, but 3 minutes of Pong is enough for my lifetime.)

7. Too many of the mini-games are more "mini" than "game." Some are just a proof of concept, like Woodgal Jr., while others like Space Race Simulator are so ridiculously short you'll literally be completing them many dozens of times before accomplishing their goals. You know those Unity tutorial videos everywhere on YouTube? These games feel like they came from those videos, which is particularly bad if you pay for the DLC. I would have rather had fewer machines featuring more content.

8. (For completionists) The achievements take a lot of fun out of the game and I highly recommend not going for them. They're mostly very easy but will have you doing some task WAY more than you'd ever dream otherwise -- such as buying and listening to EVERY SINGLE ONE of the songs on the jukebox, which are little more than cheap neckbeard hipster synth tracks. I spent like 30% of the game with the volume turned down to make it bearable. Another is passing out ten times in the arcade , which adds nothing to the experience and is an achievement only in name.

Overall, I know going for completion is a totally self-inflicted problem and I did this to myself, and this game has nearly cured me of that compulsion to do and see everything; we're playing games to have fun, and Arcade Paradise really stops being fun after about 10 hours.

Get it for the enjoyable semi-90's feel and a decent collection of mini-games (some are awesome), but don't be like me. Don't try to do everything. Enjoy the game.

Very passionate game development. Authentic 80s-90s vibe. Engaging storyline with depth. "Game within game" inception complexity. Rewarding and worth every $$$ and hour spent.

Fantastic idea
Fantastic game
it's so coll to follow the character through the story and have that feeling that you are slowly replacing something you hate with something you love
so many arcade games the emulate the kind of games you'd find in the arcades back in the day which leaves us with tons of mini game options to play around, the jukebox is awesome a great idea by the way!
the only thing is that it was so cool to build the arcade that at the end I was definitely wanting more, to see the arcade grow even bigger and mightier and better, but that's just the my mad evil side talking about conquering the world again. just don't listen to him...
The dlcs are cool, to me they weren't the best arcades in the games but they were worth it not just to complete the empty space that was left but mostly worth to support a bit more the developer for making this GEM!

This game is quite charming. The aesthetics are retro, and I love how the place changes visually as you get further into the game. In terms of gameplay, at first I thought it was going to be one of those more mundane simulators where you put laundry in a machine and the tumble dryer afterwards, but nah. You're given the choice for how you want to approach each day. Just slave away with the laundry machines? Go for it! Or you wanna grind out the arcade machines in the back? Sure, why not?

I like how there's noticeable progression. One of the first games I had grinded out was Racer Chaser and it quickly became an absolute money maker, giving me a hopper full of 250$ just about every day. It's cool that playing the games doesn't only serve as a fun side thing to do, but also actively provides them with bonus income due to rising popularity as well as bonuses from the different goals you can achieve at them. I also enjoy the soundtrack and general sound design, and how everything is gamified.

Overall, I'd say I'll give this game a solid 8/10 so far. There's a lot to do, but no pressure to get it done.