The Coin Game is an arcade and carnival simulation that is maybe too realistic for its own good. The game takes place in a small town full of robots for some reason with multiple arcades, a mall, and a carnival, and you're free to wander around all you like. There are even vehicles to drive. There are two modes - a birthday mode where you get infinite money and can do what you want, and a survival mode where you have to do odd jobs or pawn prizes you win for cash in order to buy food and keep playing at the arcades. Survival mode also asks you to invest in the businesses around town and you get part of the profits every day. I would 100% recommend starting with survival mode and not bothering with birthday mode. The arcade games and carnival kinda suck, and having actual objectives in survival mode is a lot more fun.
The town itself is kind of interesting to explore. There are houses and robot people running around all over. You can mow a lawn or babysit some robot kids to make money. There's a factory and a gas station and even an Elk's Lodge type of thing with old people playing bingo all day. You can also buy scratch lottery tickets and there are slot machines at the lodge. It's basically the exact small town I grew up in.
Back to those arcade games. It's all of the classic Chuck-E-Cheese ticket games you remember and, honestly, it's probably a little too accurate and realistic. There's Skee-Ball and coin pushers and a couple dozen other recognizable money sinks that are all rigged to screw you over and steal your money all in the name of getting a handful of tickets to exchange for literal pieces of garbage masquerading as prizes. The games are seriously mostly terrible and pointless and not fun, which is EXACTLY how they are in real life. I admire the attention to detail and accuracy in the experience, but goddamn do these games all suck. That's why I say stick to survival mode. It gives you stuff to do besides playing the horrible arcade games.
There are four arcades, each with a different theme, and some slight differences in game selection. The pirate arcade has a mini golf course, and the UFO arcade has go-kart racing. And some of the games are OK-ish. I recommend the lava marble pusher at the pirate arcade. You can get between 2-4000 tickets every $10, which is a much higher return than most of the other games.
The carnival actually manages to be even more dire and depressing than the arcades, and the games there are even more rigged to screw you over. Again, that's extremely realistic, but dang they didn't have to go this deep. And every game has skeevy guys trying to attract players by saying weird crap about how easy the game is to win. It's all so nasty and grimy and gross. I haven't been to a carnival in like 25 years but The Coin Game is exactly like I remember. You can also ride the rides, including a Ferris wheel and tilt-a-whirl and swings, but I wouldn't recommend it. You ride in first person and every ride gave me extreme motion sickness basically instantly.
So, if the arcade games all suck and the carnival is absolutely horrible, is The Coin Game still worth playing? Weirdly enough, yeah, I'd still recommend it. I can't overstate just how accurately they have recreated the precise way all of these games are shitty and terrible just like they are in the real world. It's genuinely impressive. It's so cozy and nostalgic to experience all of these things I haven't done since I was a kid. Paying $20 for The Coin Game is also way, way, WAY cheaper than going to an arcade or carnival in real life, so you get all of the same disappointment from the comfort of your couch at a fraction of the price.
The Coin Game is genuinely a fairly miserable experience that sucks, but it's because of that impressively comprehensive simulation of the notorious shittiness of arcades and carnivals that it's still totally worth playing. Younger players probably won't "get" it, but us olds with memories of arcades in the 90's will feel right at home.
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