Arcade Paradise is a love letter to management sims and ’90s arcades

polygon.com:

British developer Nosebleed Interactive is interested in clashing juxtapositions — specifically, what happens when you jam classic, in-the-moment arcade gaming up against the long view and slow build of the management genre. 2017’s Vostok Inc. was an unholy but fruitful marriage of twin-stick shooter and exponential clicker in the name of galactic domination, and its two flavors turned out to be more complementary than you might think.

Now the studio gives us Arcade Paradise — which is out now on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch. It’s a management game about turning a shabby laundromat with a couple of arcade machines in the back into a video gaming haven, and all the cabinets you can buy are fully playable, original creations. (Well, fairly original, but I’ll get to that.) This game is simultaneously more ambitious and more humdrum than Vostok Inc., and it explores some more awkward tensions between its two halves.

The time frame is some unspecified period between 1987 and 2002 that somehow manages to be all those years at once. The menu is a monochrome PalmPilot-alike with a stylus, there’s a chunky dialup PC with instant messaging software on it, and the games range from vintage 8-bit to early 3D. You are a 19-year-old layabout and your self-made father has placed you in charge of one of his businesses, a laundromat, in the hope it will make something of you. Of course, you would rather make something of it: namely, a thriving arcade. But you’ll have to do it behind your disapproving father’s back.

There’s a lot of busywork. The laundromat, which you wander around in first person, generates the revenue you’ll need to build out the arcade, and it needs maintenance. It’s an endless grind of loading and unloading