Arcade Paradise Review

I had a lot of fun completing Arcade Paradise, it was a grind fest and it has some very challenging achievements, but with practice and patience, you will be able to do it. ~50h and no missable achievements.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: ~50h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 7/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: Yes, I used this one
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: Yes, many achievements are very grindy
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: Yes, for some achievements you need luck.. like winning a game of Patience
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty setting and you can unlock achievements with the Konami cheat code on (I highly suggest you use that every time you start the game).
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No. However, achievements might unlock a bit late

Explaining why Arcade Paradise is a fun game might be a bit challenging. I can clearly see this game isn’t for everybody. It has a lot of busy work, and challenging achievement and is a long game overall with a lot of grinding to do… However, I had an amazing time playing this game.

In Arcade Paradise you start with running the laundry shop of your dad, so you have to do the laundry from other people. This can be very annoying, but if you use the Konami cheat code on the screen before the main menu (Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A) you will have a lot easier time with this part of the game, as it removes the timer for doing those tasks and always give you an S ranking for doing the laundry. You will know when the code work because of the golden washing machine on the main menu, as well as the gold washing machines in-game.

However, the focus will become more and more on playing remakes of old arcade games. Saving up money to buy more arcades and upgrading the store, to even fit more arcades. At one point you’ll have unlocked a to-do list with 3 items on it every day. I would recommend focusing a bit more on the to-do list once it becomes available but don’t worry too much and don’t bother with really annoying ones. You can buy upgrades with the Pounds earned from those tasks and the assistant manager will be very handy to unlock early on.

A lot of the achievements you’ll unlock for just doing stuff and others are based on specific arcades. At the start, I would recommend just enjoying yourself, playing the games you like and try to unlock all the challenges on those machines. Gladly you won’t have to complete all the challenges for all the arcades (that would make this game impossible to 100% imo), you “only” need to do that for 15 machines, and some are way easier than others. Two other tips to make this game shorter: After you bought a few upgrades that are really important, save up your pounds till you have around 600/700 and buy all the songs for the jukebox, after that achievement popped, force the game to close so it doesn’t save and then just keep spending that money on upgrades, as there is an achievement for getting all the upgrades as well. And at the times you feel bored and waiting for a day to pass by… play the space racing game as you need to unlock all upgrades for that one for an achievement.

The game has some bugs. I played through pc game pass and the game didn’t want to start with a controller but then 99% of the time it showed keyboard controls in tutorials. The achievements also don’t pop right away, but visiting the achievement list in a browser tab on Xbox, somehow made them unlock every time. And I have had bugs within 2 arcade games within the game: the ball in Barkanoid got stuck on the last level so I wasn’t able to complete the game in that run and had to restart it. And the Thomp game with the beavers you need to hit.. the A button didn’t work, so that made that spot completely useless in the game, but I could just ignore it and still complete all the challenges for that one.

I had a lot of fun completing Arcade Paradise, it was a grind fest and it has some very challenging achievements, but with practice and patience, you will be able to unlock all the achievements.

This review for Arcade Paradise was written on 17 July 2023, based on the current Xbox (Windows) version of the game which has 54 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.