Imagine if you made a game that was all about playing games in arcades, winning tokens, and using them to get prizes. Now, imagine that you wanted it to have a mode with some sort of goal to build toward. This is what The Coin Game has added to its long-awaited 1.0 release after years of being in Early Access. All the game really needed to do, aside from polishing, was to marry the above concepts. Instead, it has sidestepped the most obvious path forward to deliver a game that’s buggy, tedious, and seemingly uninterested in playing to its strengths.
The main mode in the weirdly named The Coin Game is really its survival mode, which actually injects some goals and a degree of challenge to the arcade sandbox that people have been playing for years. The premise is simple: all of the arcades on the island have shut down, so you need to scrounge together the cash to invest in them and open them back up again to help save the game’s island. The way to do this should be self-explanatory; the game’s strong suit is its arcade games after all. Naturally, you’d play these games to get tickets, trade the tickets in for prizes, and then trade the prizes in for cash to enable you to keep opening more arcades.
Bafflingly, The Coin Game doesn’t do this. When you start a new survival mode file, you wake up in your house and are informed of what to do by a series of text messages. There are a handful of jobs you can work at the outset when all the game’s arcades are closed. You can mow a single lawn, babysit a single family, do a single paper route, deliver pizzas, or return shopping carts to a store. You’ll need to repeat these tasks until you have enough cash to get one of the arcades open. I did this, expecting to be able to start playing games and winning prizes to keep progressing.
I won tickets until I was able to get a prize, then I took it down to the pawn shop, only to find that my reward was a measly $3. For whatever reason, most of the prizes are completely worthless. If you want to focus on progressing in The Coin Game‘s survival mode, the game wants you to keep doing the above jobs. That’s right, the game decided that the vast majority of the arcade games, y’know, the reason the game exists, don’t even need to be played in its main mode. It’s a staggeringly poor choice. Instead, you’re expected to grind the same few jobs repetitively.
Granted, the balance in the game is so poor that even doing this isn’t the best use of your time. There are two specific arcade games that are so busted that you can make all the money you need solely from playing the two of them. One is a coin pusher game that always has $100 bills sitting on top. If you spend about $10 to buy more coins to add, you’re almost sure to get one in short order. The other is an incredibly easy shooting game that has you shoot a paper star at the fair until it’s completely gone. You do this a few times, and you get an item worth $100. The money you get from damn near everything else in the game pales in comparison.
There are even some glaring oversights that make this that much easier. For the star-shooting game, you can save before you start (the game’s save system is quite poor), accrue credits by winning the game, and then reload your save. You’ll have all of your money, but the credits will remain. Once, I took all of the items I won from this game, banana plushies worth $100 each, to the pawn shop and sold them. I saved after this, but upon reloading this save, I found all of the plushies in my inventory again. See, the inventory feature in The Coin Game is shockingly broken.
Whenever you have anything in your inventory, saving and reloading will likely mean you’ll lose it all. Or some of the things you had before will magically reappear. As such, I always made sure to keep my inventory empty once I reloaded. Reloading saves itself is weird, as you need to click new game on the menu and then load it afterward. Weirdly, the survival mode only seems to have manual saves and nothing else. Pausing the game will stop the timer, but various on-screen elements will keep going. There’s so much about the way this game works that’s confusing or barely functional.
As it’s a survival mode, there are naturally connotating elements too. You’ve got health and energy levels that need to be topped up. These seem like they’d be interchangeable, so their very existence is confusing. They both tick down steadily, and your health seems to drop more the lower your energy is, but it’s not really explained, and it doesn’t make much sense. It’s just another poorly considered feature. You refill these with food and drinks, so sometimes you have to go grocery shopping, which I thought was kind of cool. You’ve also got a curfew to mind. Each in-game day lasts about 15 minutes, and not getting home in time will get you a game over.
The Coin Game has a really ugly open world that you’ll mostly be traversing using the bicycle the game gives you. The camera view tilts wildly when you steer the bike, and it controls like garbage. It also gets stuck very easily, which will prevent you from getting off the bike at times. You can’t pause on the bike, so you’ll have to shut the program down manually if this happens. You can purchase other vehicles too, such as a minivan or a go-kart. You can pause the game when you’re in these, at least seemingly. I did this once and got a game over as the timer kept ticking down, as the pause didn’t count. Oops.
Once you reopen all four arcades in the survival mode, you get to go on a little scavenger hunt to open the way to a hidden area. There’s some padding in this, but I was surprised that the last step actually requires you to win a specific prize to open the way. The Coin Game literally waits until its last five minutes to actually make you play games for tickets. Amazing. Then it’s over, and you get a boatload of cash to do whatever you want with.
Then there are the arcade games. This game has an overwhelmingly positive average on Steam with over 5,000 reviews, so I expected the games themselves to be great. At best, they work like the real thing. These are the “gambling for tickets” type games, which are a mix of skill and chance. There’s a decent variety here, too. Skiball, basketball, shooting galleries (although two of these are straight-up broken and can’t actually be played at all for some reason), coin pushers, and ones where you try to select or hit an area to win more tickets. There are about 30 in all, but some of these have repeats. There’s even a Space Invaders clone and a pinball machine among them!
The arcades themselves, unlike the rest of the game, actually do a solid job of capturing the look and feel of American arcades in the 90s. The atmosphere is neat, and the arcade games themselves are mostly as you’d expect, despite some clear repetition among them. It just makes it all the more galling that The Coin Game didn’t even try to build its story mode around them. Granted, you’ve got the game’s birthday mode, which gives you $300 and lets you fast travel between the arcades. This is easily the better way to play the game, since whenever the game isn’t having you play arcade games, it barely works.
The Coin Game is buggy, often broken, generally ugly, and questionably put together. Its survival mode completely misunderstands the game’s appeal, the open world is mostly empty and pointless, the mechanics are half-baked, and the game is very tedious when you’re not playing its arcade games. It might possibly be the worst game on Steam to have an overwhelmingly positive review average, as it’s clearly still pretty unfinished, unpolished, and untested in many ways. You might like the arcade games themselves, but you’re likely to loathe just about everything else.
The Coin Game: The Coin Game completely and utterly wastes its potential with a main mode that plays to none of its strengths. – Andrew Farrell
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