The Coin Game is a survival sandbox arcade simulator created by solo developer devotid and published by Kwalee. It released in early access in 2019 and has been steadily updated leading up to its 1.0 release. It’s available on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation, and today I’ll be reviewing the PC version.
Life Is Cheap. Tickets Are Cheaper.
As a young lad I spent many of my formative years at my local arcade, a joint called (and I’m not making this up) the “Fun Park”. It had everything a child could ever want: a giant playplace that smelled like feet; comically cheesy pizza; a bizarre 1950s tiki-party aesthetic; and, of course, a dozen rigged arcade machines that spat out tickets, spent on penny sweets and cheap stuffed animals at an obscene markup. It was paradise.
Some days, I wish I could go back. Not literally, I mean; it’s still in business ten minutes from my house, but the tokens and tickets are gone, replaced by apps and QR scans and all the trappings of modernity. No, I mean go back to the past, when life was cheap and all that mattered was today, when I could spend my precious time rolling skeeballs and playing laser tag and not think about what tomorrow would bring.
I wanted to feel like a kid again. And thanks to The Coin Game, I did.
Gameplay
The Coin Game is, in general, an open-world arcade simulator. You play as a resident of the beautiful city of Islandville; the only human citizen, in fact. Everyone else, from your doting nanny to the grumpy man running the prize counter, is a cylindrical robot. Where did all of these robots come from? Why are you the only human on Islandville? And why can’t you leave? These are questions without answers, because your character does not care for answers. Your character cares only for tickets.
Gameplay is split between two different game modes: Birthday, and Survival. In Birthday mode, you have unlimited cash, unlimited gas, and a private limo to personally escort you to all the arcades across the island. There’s plenty of places to visit, from Larry’s, your local kids arcade, to One-Eyed Billy’s, a sprawling pirate-themed entertainment centre. If you’ve ever been to an arcade, gameplay will be pretty familiar. You jump from machine to machine, spending cash to play games designed to consume your attention, drain your wallet, and keep you coming back for more. And there are a lot of machines- over 50, in fact, all based on real, existing arcade titles: claw machines, ball droppers, Big Bass wheels, skeeball, video game cabinets, and my personal drug of choice: coin pushers. The amount of time and money I spent grinding cards from the Dunko coin pusher machines is frankly embarrassing.
Island life
Far more than arcade games fill Islandville, though. You can explore the island with many different vehicles: bike, car, and trusty golf cart. In addition to all the machines, you can play fully-simulated laser tag, mini-golf, and even kart racing! Outside of the arcades, you can go to the beach, chill out at the local waterpark, ride rides at the traveling carnival, or head back home to take care of your pet goose and decorate your room with all your prizes. And good heavens, there are a lot of prizes! Glow sticks, salt lamps, crystal skulls, boomboxes, and so, so many stuffed plushies.
But if you’re tired of the good life and wish you could endlessly worry about your finances and health like a proper adult, Survival mode is for you! This game mode starts you with a crisp $2.50 and gives you the goal of saving enough money to reopen all of the arcades on the island, while also keeping your health and energy topped off. This game mode turns you from the birthday boy to the local gambling addict.
Please sir, more pennies
You’ll take every odd job you can manage, from mowing lawns to delivering newspapers, to save up pennies on the dollar. Then you’ll blow it all on the Mega Drop machine in the vain hope that you’ll win the Mega Extreme Jackpot and earn enough tickets to buy a Stuffed Rasta Banana, which you can then pawn off to barely recoup your gambling costs. You’ll live off of sour candy and soft drinks, pawning off the crinkled aluminium cans just to earn another 50 cents. You’ll either reopen all the arcades and earn enough residuals to keep you set for life, or be reduced to trawling the beach for spare tare and discarded scratch tickets. On Islandville, life’s a game, and the winner is the one with the tickets to buy victory.
If you’re looking for a gripping narrative, engaging characters, and dramatic conclusions, you won’t find them here. All of The Coin Game’s focus is on atmosphere and simulation, often at the detriment of simplicity. And, like most survival games, if you don’t enjoy a core gameplay loop that is both stressful and repetitive, you won’t get much out of Survival mode. But what it does do, it does exceptionally well. The Coin Game has some of the best physics-based arcade simulations on the market, and if that’s all you care about you can play them straight from the main menu: no open world, no frills. The Coin Game, like a good arcade, offers a whole lot of experiences for many different partygoers.
Graphics
A single person made The Coin Game, and in many places it shows. The graphics fall on a wide spectrum, from “impressive” to “PS1 grass texture”. While the human models are a little weird (especially the female one with its bizarre proportions and painted-on clothes), the game smartly only uses them for the mostly unseen player character. The NPCs, on the other hand, are all cute, round, prop-covered robots. Importantly, the arcades and games have received the most graphical effort. Areas like the UFO Arcade and especially One-Eyed Billy’s are proof that you don’t need technical, high-fidelity graphics to create cosy and engaging locations.
The graphics are also very well optimized, and the game is designed to be playable on just about any device. I was initially concerned about the quality of the graphics when I started playing on my 2440×1440, until I realized the settings automatically default to “Potato”. I didn’t experience any game-breaking technical issues in my 5 hours of playing, save for some light stuttering in the UFO Arcade (which I think was caused by new go-karters loading into the map).
Audio
Finally, the game’s sound design is top notch. A whole lot of love has gone into recreating the SFX of real-life arcade machines, from the deep THUNK of a colourful ball dropping onto a spinning wheel of points, to the soft musical clatter of a pile of tokens pushed from a ledge. While their is a soundtrack of decent generic music in the overworld, most of the time you’ll be listening to the sounds of a real arcade: a dozen looping audio tracks blending over each other, harmonizing with the shrill whines of excited children and the thrumming whirrs of the ticket dispenser. As before, the focus is on the atmosphere, to grand results.
Oh, and as far as I can tell one guy with a really good “old lady” voice did all of the voice acting.
Longevity
I put around 5 hours into the game for this review. I’d estimate that a casual arcade player would get a solid 10 hours or more of playtime, and even more if you dive into the Survival mode. The game is also available on VR, but I can’t speak to how it feels on a headset.
Final Thoughts
The Coin Game is not a deep game, but it is a fun game. The game seeks to emulate the classic arcade experience and build a world around it, and I can strongly say that it succeeds. It builds on its core gameplay loop with a wide variety of activities, environments, and game modes. It uses neat tricks and solid design principles to bypass its graphical weaknesses and create delightfully atmospheric locations. And above all else, it completely captures the feeling of blowing your weekly allowance on games of chance and saltwater taffy.
The Coin Game didn’t challenge me, or move me to tears (except when I missed the final block on Stack’Em). What it did was make me smile. It made made me feel like a kid again. And for that I can confidently give The Coin Game a Thumb Culture Gold Award.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some Dunko cards to grind.
Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this review.
If you enjoyed this review, why not check out this review of Packing Life?
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