Have you ever played one of those coin pusher arcade machines? The ones where you drop coins down onto a shelf that moves back and forth, hoping to cause a chain reaction that will dislodge a little avalanche of money into the prize tray?
If you're anything like me, your memory is probably one of despair and frustration. Designed by the most nefarious minds in engineering, they are the ultimate anti-climax generators, always seeming tantalisingly close to a payout and always stubbornly refusing to give one up.
On the one hand, Raccoin is a roguelike based on coin-pusher machines. But on the other, it's my emotional catharsis simulator. I can finally let those frustrating memories go—Raccoin's machines will let me win, and win spectacularly.
The structure is simple—each round, I get a certain number of coin drops (which I can aim rather more precisely than with a real machine) and have to try and reach that round's target score. That score translates to prize tickets, and between rounds I can tip the odds in my favour by spending them on special coins, power-ups, and passive bonuses.
It's a very simple thrill at first. I go for the obvious boons and chuck loads of coins in, and I'm rewarded with noisy jackpots.
There's an element of speed and dexterity to it—I need to aim coins at the right spots to keep the cascade flowing as long as possible, to build up the combo meter. When the trickle finally ceases and the meter drains down, I'm rewarded with a random bonus based on how high the combo got—anything from a few extra coins to a huge tower of money rising up in the middle of the machine, begging to be knocked over.
But, as is usually the case with roguelikes, it's when I start digging into the possible strategies that things get really interesting. And weird.
See, some special coins are pretty straightforward—like the tickoin, which gives you bonus tickets when you score it. But it doesn't take much scratching at the surface before I find myself bumping bunny coins into each other to make them multiply until I have a big enough herd to send out a wolf coin to hunt them all down, which leaves behind poo coins that can fertilise my seed coins, and then if I water them they'll grow into giant coin trees…
It can all be surprisingly brain-twisting. Because the state of the machine carries over from round to round, there's strategy in building a kind of ecosystem, holding on to vital bonuses and accumulating particular coin types. But of course, that ecosystem is constantly shifting down towards the tray. It's like trying to build a sandcastle while the tide's coming in.
My biggest winning run revolves around the ally coin. Every time it touches a rare silver coin, it turns it into a copy of itself, and its value increases for every copy still in play. By using other boons to increase the spawn rate of those silver coins, and building up caches of ally coins in the corners of the machine, I eventually hit a point of exponential growth. I'm constantly creating more silver, and there are so many ally coins already in play that they quickly assimilate every one that pops out and become more and more valuable.
Every time even one finally meets its end in the tray, I'm showered with points, smashing through round goal after round goal until I hit the demo's end. A slightly broken strategy, perhaps, but my catharsis is complete. I don't have to resent coin pusher machines anymore—I have reached jackpot nirvana.
You can try Raccoin for yourself for free—there's a generous demo currently available on Steam.
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