You begin with around 50 bucks in your pocket and a tiny shop that is barely big enough for a table with a computer and a single broken arcade machine. Fixing it is your first task, but fortunately, it is easy. You simply press a button to repair one percentage point. Each percentage costs money, and you do not need to restore a machine to perfect condition for it to work.
However, a machine will be less popular and earn less money when it is in poor condition. Its condition constantly decreases while it is being played, so you will have to do a lot of repairing, especially once you fill the shop with more machines. If you let the condition drop too low, a machine can even explode, leaving you with nothing.
Once you open the shop, kids will come in and start playing. They are a messy bunch, so they constantly throw trash on the floor. Trash affects your reputation, meaning you need to pick it up, although you do not have to deal with trash bags or dispose of it anywhere. After a few minutes, you can buy trashcans that supposedly reduce the amount of trash, but there is no indication of how much area a trashcan covers or how effective it actually is, because it feels like it does nothing at all. There is still plenty of trash left around the shop that you have to pick up yourself. Occasionally, picking up trash can earn you some money, but this happens very rarely.
Each time you open the shop, a new day begins. However, kids will play for less than a minute before leaving, which ends the day. This allows you to make progress quickly and gain access to money, letting you see more of the game in a short amount of time. Most of your money will go toward buying new machines, which can be purchased through your computer.
The available machines change every day, and you can see their condition, size, and popularity before buying them. If something is not making much money and costs too much to maintain, it may be smarter to sell it and replace it with something new. Popularity constantly goes up and down, so it is impossible to predict which machines will perform well. One of the more enjoyable aspects is that some machines can be played, featuring homages to classic games. Unfortunately, this is little more than a distraction, as the only reward is a place on the leaderboards.
Before expanding too much, it is better to keep earning money from a couple of machines and buy all the available upgrades. There are only five upgrades, and aside from the trash can, you can purchase a vacuum cleaner for faster trash collection, a detector that helps find trash that can be difficult to see or may end up underneath arcade machines, and a vital repair tool that allows you to hold the button instead of pressing it for every individual percentage point.
While repairing machines is already a hassle, you also have to deal with collecting money from them. This works in much the same way as repairing, requiring you to hold the button for every single coin. It quickly becomes annoying. To solve this problem, you can hire a kid to collect the coins for you. He arrives after the other kids leave, allowing you to focus on repairs while he handles the money.
Once you have a steady initial income, you can start expanding by adding more rooms, which allow you to place more machines. The rooms are not particularly expensive, and their layouts and sizes are preset, but there is still some customization through lights, carpets, and a neon sign outside.
Sadly, the game shows almost everything it has to offer within the first few minutes and becomes repetitive very quickly. There is nothing new to discover as you progress through the days, aside from a random event involving a space ball that starts destroying your machines. You get rid of it by holding your cursor over it until it disappears.
Once all the rooms are packed with machines, the game turns into a much bigger grind. You have to work considerably more than you did at the beginning because there are no new upgrades or useful helpers to unlock. There is no cleaning service, so you have to go through every room with a vacuum cleaner, while machines constantly need to be repaired. Even the kid you hire to collect money becomes less useful as you expand. Instead of collecting money from all the rooms at once, he visits one room, returns to the main room to deposit the money, and then repeats the process for every other room.
The game lets you expand your arcade quickly and buy everything it has to offer within about an hour. Unfortunately, the lack of meaningful progression and increasingly tedious chores soon turn the experience into a repetitive grind. In fact, it eventually feels more like a cleaning and repair simulator, while the arcade management aspect loses its focus because you end up with plenty of money and nothing left to spend it on.
Because of that, it’s easier to simply buy rooms for the achievement and then sell every machine except one. You’ll have far less to worry about, less to clean and maintain, won’t waste money on a kid, and can easily grind for a full year, which is one of the more demanding achievements. Considering how little content the game offers, its price is far too high, and I think it would be much more reasonable at half the cost. Also, some achievements are either broken or reset when you quit the game.
