I Thought This Roguelike Was Just About Playing A Coin Pusher...

Raccoin is about huge payouts, emotional catharsis, and coin ecosystems.

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.

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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…

Source: PC Gamer