It’s pretty cool that developers have found ways to make gambling into a more interesting hobby nowadays. As a child, all you could do was simply watch people throw away their life savings on a desperate hope to feed their addiction that eventually lead to the lowest quality of life, followed shortly by utter annihilation. But now we can do that with roguelite elements!

First, Balatro brought poker into a new world of Jokers and incredible combinations, and that’s quite enjoyable. Then Clover Pit showed you a dark world of slot machines with Satanic influence and impossible odds. Now, Raccoin takes the coin pusher machines that fill every game center in Japan and brings them to your home console, where you can really throw away hours of your life with as little gameplay as possible! Oh future, you are definitely worth living in and not a nightmarish reality!

Aw, but lookkit the puppy! He knows science!

If you haven’t spent some time at what’s left of arcades recently, you might not be aware of the coin pusher machines and how they attract children like rotting fruit to mayflies. These two-tiered machinations invite you to pay money to get tokens, and then feed the tokens into the machine where they line up on an upper platform that slowly moves in and out, like the rhythm of a ventilator attached to the wealthy relative you’re waiting to die. Coins will eventually fall, and be moved to a second, larger area that doesn’t move, but is affected by the top’s motion. After enough tokens move around, some will be pushed off the lower level, and you get tickets for prizes. Your payout can increase significantly if others have already put in lots of tokens, so bet on poor bastards being less fortunate than you!

<i>Raccoin has none of the cynicism that I’ve put out here, and, in fact, is significantly more lighthearted than either Balatro, Clover Pit or Slots and Daggers. The entire presentation is done in a wildly cute and effective pixel art style where the elements of risk, luck and mania are just pleasant background notes against the overall simple and enjoyable vibe of the actual game. You can load tokens into shooters on the left and right side and deliver them through keyboard or mouse clicks. The idea is to accomplish fifteen waves of gameplay, each time with a higher and higher payout goal in order to clear it. You win tickets from tokens that clear the drop level, and the tickets can be used at a shop that opens from each wave’s finish. The shop is where the roguelike elements come into play, and the game goes bananas from there.

I cannot stress enough how much thought went into the execution of Raccoin to the point that it’s admirable. You have to consider passive charms that you can buy (limited to having five at a time) that increase coin value, multiplier value, and different coin value. Yes, you also have weird, alternate tokens that you can purchase for a separate launcher that have a variety of effects, like rabbit coins that breed with each other or wolf coins that eat the rabbit coins and grow stronger. I love that you have the wolf eat the rabbits, then poop out poop coins, which interact with locust coins, and the whole ecosystem of it is wild. Single use “prize balls” can be purchased or won and allow you to open up a black hole, detonate areas of the machine, or create barriers to force coins to flow a certain way. It’s madness.

A lot of the ideas are intuitive and make themselves clear the second you begin playing. The alternate tokens give you more points but are limited, so you want more slots in your separate launcher, which you buy with tickets to expand. The prize balls that can and will drop will be converted into tickets if you don’t have room for more (you can only carry two at once), so you hedge your bets on which you might use immediately, which you might use in the future and what should just be converted into purchase fodder. There’s a prize wheel that spins and charges based on the number of tokens you can get to drop without stopping, so creating massive combos (which is always a priority) takes on a more urgent life. In short, Raccoin is incredibly good at getting you hooked on the gameplay loop.

So dropping this coin into play, I now get 20 extra coins, which stacks, which means I’m turning into Scrooge McDuck.

Which is good…and bad. On the one hand, as I mentioned before, there’s no dark story mode, no sinister underpinning that gives you a creepy vibe. Hell, the more you play, the more you unlock to try, like different machines with variable modifiers, or a small cast of animal hosts to be your guide and allow for interesting interpretations. Much like how Balatro has decks to alter the flavor or direction of your hands, the different animals can influence the tokens that drop or the way that you process progress. The Biologist is more focused on animal based tokens for effects, whereas the Trader brings in the wonderful element of stocks to go along with the already pressure filled gambling aspect. Each host is simply unlocked by getting to the 12th round of gameplay with the previous host, so progress stacks nicely.

And it really does stack nicely. After the initial setup and tutorial of it all, Raccoin rewards you by showing how fast things evolve and advance in a short amount of time. You’ll clear the first four rounds before you even know what’s happening, stopping by the store to grab a handful of new tokens and maybe a lucky charm or two. You’ll expand your token holding slots, drop some strategic shots and watch the roulette wheel spin to reward you with prize balls and, on occasion, a giant coin tower that is a sight to behold. Once I got my combo meter stacked so fast that I built a second tower behind my first, resulting in a massive push that earned tens of thousands of points in a single moment. It was glorious and really stimulated my monkey brain.

BUILD IT HIGHER, WE MUST SHOW GOD WHAT WE’VE AMASSED.

Then I started needing to focus more to get past the subsequent rounds, with each moment taking just a bit longer. Suddenly I was invested in making sure I was dropping my specialty tokens at the right time for combinations. I had to judge when was the right moment to fire things off, when to activate my collected prizes, when I thought I could do the most damage with a black or white hole. I came to rely on the Auto-Fill bird who empties coins into blank areas on the map, and getting the mid-stage reward of “unlimited Auto-Fills” was imperative, particularly when I was dealing with “bad coins.” Oh, right, the game “punishes” you with coins that offer negative effects (minus points, locking prizes, etc.) but those are just opportunities to use other prizes and tokens to actually get even more points.

At some point, you begin to see how this game operates in a digital space that could not be possible for physical. I don’t just mean the random UFOs that fly in or the positively disrespectful way they treat explosions in an arcade cabinet: I mean the actual disregard for physics.

Coins and prize balls generally collide and interact correctly, but you’ll see coins begin sliding and moving in ways that shouldn’t be possible, especially not in traditional coin pusher machines. This is interesting because it also gives hope to players who aren’t willing to simply start a new run immediately. If you wait long enough once the raccoon declares you bankrupt, there’s a chance for enough things to move to trigger a roulette spin or a prize ball to eventually drop, allowing the game to continue. It becomes a real test of patience if you don’t want to restart.

Now to sit patiently until this cyclone resolves itself. You know, like in the arcades.

Which is how a single run ends up turning into an hour at least. One thing that I really like about roguelikes is the ability to dip in and out in a short amount of time. Balatro lets you do a few hands in a few minutes. The Binding of Isaac can have a whole run done in 20 minutes if you’re good, and twenty seconds if you’re terrible. There’s always an off ramp so you can put down the game and walk away to do something else to help break things up, and that feels like a healthy way to approach roguelikes. Raccoin compels you to sit longer, stare harder, click your mouse more and hope for a miracle that crosses the zenith of gaming and straight into addiction country. Once you realize that, it takes on a really ugly feeling.

That’s not necessarily an admonishment of the game itself. There are so many clicker titles that exist for the sole purpose of making a player feel content and rewarded for doing nothing, and at least Raccoin is doing it without suggesting you could drop another 99 cents to keep going. There are genuinely so many things to unlock that come in at a harried pace that you don’t have time to dwell on time wasted or lack of engagement. The fact that you can start to customize the game more over time and build your own prize wheel or change up cabinet skins and types makes it really interesting. It’s damn cool that it scales difficulty modes based on successes, and, if I had to gauge my invested time, it probably took less overall to unlock new levels in Raccoin than other gambling roguelikes.

Turning a circle into a triangle has never meant so much.

The point is that Raccoin is positively built to be the time trap of your dreams. It’s got so many visual stimulations, an absurd combination factor, and just enough glitches to make it fun and remind you it’s not actually in an arcade. It’s so cute and detailed, and there’s honestly a ton to unlock if this grooves with you. It’s a brilliant and devilishly captivating game, and I’m thrilled it’s on PC so I can physically walk away from it when I need to. Developer Doraccon has crafted a pixel art addiction that I’m both in love with and deeply afraid, and that takes a special skill set. I recommend keeping an eye on this one moving forward, because Raccoin has the potential to be the next really big roguelike if it spreads far enough. Get comfortable and grab some snacks: this game will go for a while.

Raccoin is available now on Steam.

Reviewed on PC.

A Copy of Raccoin was provided by the publisher.