Xbox Game Pass Hidden Gems (March 22): Arcade Paradise

Arcade Paradise is the perfect game if an arcade is your idea of paradise. Welcome back to Xbox Game Pass Hidden Gems, our weekly look at a title found on Microsoft's subscription service you might not have given a second glance to. I know we're a couple of days late here, but we're still determined to give you what you crave: more awesome games.

If you read or hear the description of Arcade Paradise, you'd be forgiven for assuming it's essentially "Arcade Tycoon." Well, only sort of forgiven since there already is an Arcade Tycoon (that one's pretty good, too.) But, even if there wasn't, Arcade Paradise is a completely different animal.

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Arcade Paradise will transport you back to the 90s

To grasp the concept of Arcade Paradise, it helps to go over this title's story. Yep, there's a story. It's not a particularly deep one, but a story nonetheless.

It's sometime in the 1990s, and you step into what we can only assume are the Birkenstocks of Ashley. Ash is the child of Gerald (voiced by Doug Cockle, the voice of Geralt of The Witcher series), a wealthy laundromat empresario. The Dad, feeling his young offspring lacks direction (and needs a job), brings them in to run one of his locations, King Wash.

On their first day on the job, Ashley discovers a few arcade game machines in the laundromat's back room. Through research, they realize that when the arcade games were made accessible to the laundromat's patrons, they were bringing in more money than the laundry machines.

So, this title has you — at least in the early stages of the game — balancing running the laundromat (handling wash loads, picking up trash, and other busy work to bring in cash) and stocking, expanding, and managing the arcade in the back.

Eventually, the goal is to turn the entire building into an arcade and get out of the laundry business altogether. Oh, and also to show up Ashley's dad, who is, to be fair, kind of a jerk.

Every arcade machine you bring into the arcade is a legit playable minigame. Each one is either an homage to a classic game or a mash-up of some. For example, Racer Chaser is a mix of Grand Theft Auto... and Pac-Man. Not every single game is a winner, but the majority of them are, and you're not required to play every one of them. However, the more you play a game, the more revenue it brings in.

There are more than 35 arcade games to work with in this title, including the pixel-art fighter based on the classic short film Kung Fury (when are they ever going to make that full-length version, anyway?). Moreover, a number of other games are available via paid DLC and not included in the standard version of Arcade Paradise on Game Pass.

However, the DLC packs are extremely reasonably priced, as is the game itself. Just in case it's ever scheduled to leave the service, and you want to keep playing it.

What can I say? Arcade Paradise is a fun, unique title that's worth, at the very least, a bit of your time if you're a Game Pass subscriber. It's on both PC and the Xbox service, and it plays pretty much the same on both.

It's certainly a game that you can sit down and grind out until you finish the story. But it's also just fine if you're looking for something to pick up and play for an hour or two.

Next week, we've got a two-fer ù, and they're both modern pixel art masterpieces. Until then, happy gaming!