Acclaimed management game Arcade Paradise is getting the VR treatment, and in the run-up to its release on Meta Quest, developer Nosebleed Interactive has shared a closer look at how the whole thing will play once you’ve shoved your head into its lovingly grimy recreation of 1993.
As in the 2022 original, Arcade Paradise VR challenges players to turn their family business – a run-down laundrette – into a thriving arcade, one shiny new cabinet at a time. It’s a very hands-on kind of thing – each day you manually collect trash, wash and fold clothes, and unclog the toilet in first-person as you strive for greater front-of-shop efficiency and gradually expand your arcade empire – so it’s a pretty natural fit for VR, where the whole immersive draw is getting to enthusiastically manipulate your virtual surroundings (and then throw something at a wall).
In Arcade Paradise VR, you can toss, rub, scrub, load, and clean using natural motions, then get stuck into those arcade games when not working your virtual fingers to the bone. Nosebleed’s VR adaptation of Arcade Paradise features 39 playable cabinets, 27 of which have been carried across from the original – which featured a whole range of completely new, beautifully realised arcade games inspired by retro classics – plus 12 specific to VR.
There’s paddle punching, air hockey, laser gun blasting, table football, whack-a-mole, basketball, and more, some of which are featured in Nosebleed’s new Arcade Paradise VR gameplay trailer. Unfortunately, there’s no hint of a release date beyond an unhelpfully vague “coming soon”, so while we wait for more concrete news, here’s Eurogamer’s Christian Donlan, summing up the original Arcade Paradise’s charms.
“What a thing,” he wrote in his Recommended review back in 2022. “Arcade Paradise made me think of Outrun and GTA and Mr Driller, and also my own working life in my teens as a dishwasher and a double-glazing salesperson, sure. But it also made me think of those mazes tiled on the walls of Warren Street tube. Warren Street! Get it? Little puzzles made to be solved between trains, but tricky enough to encourage you to miss your train in the first place. Then you solve the maze and you’re off into a wider maze of the underground network. And maybe, who knows, there’s a maze beyond that too.”