The Coin Game fills a much-needed void that I never knew needed to be filled. If you're looking for the tantalizing and fantastical feeling of winning a shit ton of tickets at your local kid's arcade and pizzeria joint, this is the game to cost you hours of your life. It's incredibly silly to describe the adrenaline of watching the coins fall in a coin pusher or aligning the red square tower to get worthless prizes, but no game out there simulates these machines as well as this game. Even outside of those moments, exploring the locales and stores is surprisingly immersive. At the time of writing this, this is still on Early Access, constantly being updated with fixes and new content. This means what you're experiencing is not in a finished (nor optimized) state, so a lot of hiccups are to be expected that will take you out of the immersion.

This may be the only game that adequately replicates the feel of pre-internet suburban summer vacations without any strange emotional baggage or suffocating irony attached to it. There is a certain level of jank to everything that isn't an arcade machine, expected from a lone dev using unity to create an open world. Normally this would be a detriment but it comes off as charmingly appropriate for a teen navigating the world on their own. Since everyone in town is a robot, it feels less embarrassing when you struggle to operate a shopping cart or get temporarily trapped in a dumpster because you really wanted a discarded bag of chips or fumble buying a ticket only to take the bus the wrong way.

Despite being early access, the game is chock full of content. My only complaint is that it feels incredibly lonely sometimes. The dev has stated plans for multiplayer in the future but if you have no friends nor enjoy interacting with strangers on the internet, that won't solve the melancholy problem. It's ultimately a rather minor thing however. Just play another round of skeeball to forget it.