Review: Arcade Spirits
Despite its setting in the far future year of 20XX, Arcade Spirits is a modern story of struggling against depression, crushing capitalism, and existential dread. The player character (I stuck with the default “Ari Cader” so we’ll go with that for the purposes of this review) is a 20-something whose life has been continuously uprooted and damaged by their family’s financial troubles to the point that they’ve accepted strife as their lot in life. At the game’s opening, Ari has just lost their job as a lifeguard and is back to worrying about how they’ll help their roommate/BFF, Juniper, make rent.
Sick of Ari’s moping and pattern of dead end jobs that always seem to fall through, Juniper installs Iris, an AI personal assistant, onto Ari’s phone to help them find a job. Iris serves as a narrative explanation for all the trappings visual novels and RPGs usually trade in (relationship stats, personality indicators for answers, etc.), and after answering her questions she sets you on the path to your new “dream job”.
Iris also provides narrative explanation for most of the customization you get to do in this game, which is a lot for a visual novel and pretty cool! There’s a character creator at the beginning that allows you to choose your pronouns, hair length, hair color, clothing color, and skin tone (this part is especially neat as there’s a pretty wide variety to choose from). This is all done before you actually meet Iris, but trust me, it’s her doing.
Once she’s been downloaded onto Ari’s phone in-game, she gives you a quiz focused on how you want to play the game. You can set it up so that dialogue options are clearly demarcated into what traits they match up to or not. Iris also allows you to switch off the romance factor of the game if that’s something you’re not interested in, which is really rad for anyone who wants to check out the story but isn’t too romance-inclined.
As it turns out, the job Iris has set you up to interview for is at a mom n pop arcade called Francine’s Funplex (the Funplex for short), because in this imagining of the future, the video game crash of the 80’s never happened and arcades stayed en vogue, growing even more popular as time went on. But this one isn’t pulling in huge crowds. It’s a small business in a strip mall, with a very kind, if eccentric, older woman as its proprietor. After nailing the interview, Ari becomes the arcade’s new floor attendant and you start meeting the colorful cast of characters who frequent the Funplex.
I mean colorful in both the literal and figurative sense here. While each character is a quirky embodiment of typical romance game archetypes, they all have iconic, vibrant outfits that highlight their personalities and the overall artstyle that lends polish to the game. There’s a ton of variety within race and ethnic background as well, probably the most I’ve seen expressed in the outright text of a dating sim.
Despite being somewhat trope-y (the reserved/serious hottie, the adorable geek, etc.) each character’s plot arc touches on real world issues and deals with them fairly well, lending them, and the game as a whole, complexity. These issues often include the characters’ race, background, and even questions of gender identity in ways that feel genuinely interested in saying something, even if they’re not given the greatest amount of time to do so.
That’s not to say that the whole story is coherent and serious. The main plot, while fun and charming, dips into both silly and over the top territories frequently. As someone who enjoys Disney sequels for the pure sugary, feel-good vibes being delivered to me on a platter, I didn’t mind the multiple instances of heartfelt speeches about hope and chasing your dreams, but if that’s not your thing, it may get a bit old as it happens quite a lot.
Some of the plot beats also get a bit dramatic and out of control. Not Riverdale levels of wild, but in that same vein so that’s either a huge sell or big detractor depending on your taste. Personally, I love it, though I was continuously surprised by some of the places the story ended up going.
Unfortunately, these big jumps and trips off the beaten path of visual novels cause some pacing issues. There were multiple instances during the game where I was sure I had reached the end, only to be asked if I wanted to save before starting the next level. This was especially true when it came to my romance. The character I had chosen and I had a few different scenes that I was expecting to be the happy ending most dating sims tend to give, only to have them continue. While it would be cool if this was a subversion of what players come to expect from the routine of dating sims, it doesn’t really feel that way. It’s more of a whiplash sensation as you think Arcade Spirits, and your romance, are coming to an end only to have another scene skid into motion, especially when it happens more than once.
This inconsistency bleeds into other parts of the game as well, namely systems that interact with the narrative. One that stood out in particular for me was a situation where I was given the opportunity to tell the character I had been aiming to romance that I had feelings for them. I went through with it, we had a sweet moment, and I thought we were going to get another scene later where we got to establish the relationship more concretely.
Instead, during the next level I was told by Iris that it was time to try to woo someone and that despite the stats she had gathered, I could choose between multiple characters, with no mention of the scene that had just happened in the previous level. It was frustrating to have all the meaning of that moment seemingly taken away by the game still wanting to present multiple options. That scene was basically ret-conned back in during a later chapter, but that really only made things more confusing.
The gap between systems and narrative gets even wider once you finish the game. Even though each character is presented as a close friend of Ari’s, all of whom have unique relationships with them, if you don’t spend enough time with them and get approval points, they bail on you with some sort of explanation like “they just didn’t connect with anyone enough” This is weird since their relationships with Ari are framed as being close, but also because all of the characters are friends with each other as well, and some are even hinted at having feelings for each other outside of Ari.
How relationships play out isn’t the only site of inconsistency, either. Like I said, this is a story about struggling against the crushing forces of capitalistic greed, worrying about your future and what you can make of yourself, and depression that’s exacerbated by these other factors. But the way certain events are delivered, along with how they’re framed makes these themes a bit hard to swallow at times. Without getting into spoilers, every time it seems like something is going to go right for Ari, disaster strikes and they’re sent spiraling once again. Which would be fine if it felt more like a criticism of the gig economy or the disposable nature of workers in the eyes of companies, but instead Ari just always blames the “curse” their family has been afflicted with.
This feels like a missed opportunity since the main antagonist of the game is a heartless capitalist named Deco Nami who has taken up most of the oxygen in the arcade scene by implementing a shittier version of Dave and Buster’s, largely through shady/illegal business practices. This man is willing to crush and exploit anyone who gets in his way, and his greed becomes the main enemy of Ari and their friends at the Funplex. But Arcade Spirits is less interested in criticizing that, and more in positioning him as a general obstacle to dreams that our friends can overcome if they work hard enough and believe. I wish the game leaned less into a meritocracy ideal and did more to push back against the broken systems that allow characters like Deco Nami to become nasty corporate barons.
The same goes for Ari’s own feelings of inadequacy, burnout, and fear that they can’t achieve anything beyond the dead end jobs they’ve been drifting through. As someone in my 20’s with a liberal arts degree and not much else, this feeling is extremely relatable, but having it reduced down to “my family is just cursed” trivializes it. Ari’s family was the victim of economic downturn, and from its vaguely cyberpunk trappings, it’s not a stretch to assume that unbridled corporate greed had something to do with it too.
But that’s never really reckoned with in this story. Instead it’s mostly Ari learning to not blame their bad luck for every obstacle and to take risks even if there’s a chance they might fail. These aren’t bad lessons necessarily, but they don’t fully cash in on the setup the game provides. Which is a bummer since it could have told a story that was just as wacky while still having something to say about issues all kinds of people are facing in our current moment when it comes to job security and struggling to find one’s place in the world.
Though I found these elements to be disappointing, I can’t help but be charmed by this game. Arcade Spirits is fun, above all else. The art and music make it an enjoyable sensory experience throughout and all of the characters are charming and provide most of the game’s social commentary, and relatability (Arcade Spirits is one of the few games I’ve encountered that manages to land its attempts at connecting with its audience in through memes and direct references to unbridled thirst). I found myself growing attached to all of them, even if I zeroed in on one above all others immediately for my romance path. And though I think it did trip up the pacing and story-delivery, the attempts to subvert normal visual novel/dating sim expectations made the game more interesting as I was constantly left guessing as to what could possibly be coming next.
There’s plenty about the game that’s silly and probably too cheesy, but these elements give Arcade Spirits a charm and sense of warmth I can’t deny. I found myself smiling and laughing all throughout, and it managed to scratch an itch of silly yet serious for me that’s not embraced nearly enough. If you like getting to romance hot video game characters with surprising depth, want to enjoy a wild B-movie grade story, or both, Arcade Spirits is absolutely worth checking out. It’s available for Mac, Windows, and Linux on both Steam, Itch.io, and a variety of other platforms.
