Arcade Paradise review – my beautiful laundrette simulator

metro.co.uk:

A clever homage to the arcades of the 1990s and the drudgery of your first teenage job.

Remember those teenage years when you first realised the drudgery and boredom involved in doing menial jobs, for desperately needed currency? Cleverly, and rather bizarrely, Arcade Paradise lets you revisit those heady, revelatory times, while also functioning as a love letter to the video game arcades of the 1990s.

From age 14 onwards, I can recall having a string of dire holiday jobs, including working behind the counter at the local greengrocers, packing hi-fi components in Slough, and working on a machine tool floor shovelling swarf (the finger-shredding residue from lathing metal into components). By comparison, Arcade Paradise’s protagonist, Ashley, has it easy. His domineering, puffed-up father, a successful businessman always keen to do his son down, has a laundrette which he grudgingly lets his son take over.

It’s not just a laundrette, however. The backroom contains a few arcade machines and Ashley is a keen gamer, a fact you can tell by the way in which he gamifies the routine tasks required to maintain the laundrette: unblocking the toilet becomes a boss-battle, cleaning up chewing gum and chucking rubbish in the skip around the corner become timing games, and everything – including the wash cycle – earns you money, which can be reinvested in the laundrette.

Arcade Paradise’s period 1990s feel is spot-on. In the cramped office, you have an early PC, which connects to the nascent web via a modem, and soon you start earning enough cash to add to the arcade machines. The machines themselves don’t merely ape classics of the time, but take a mash-up approach: combining, say, Pac-Man with Grand Theft Auto, Candy Crush with Zelda