If you’ve ever wanted to feel satisfaction from a coin pushing machine, RACCOIN: Coin Pusher Roguelike will give you the hope, joy, and endless chaos that the real thing couldn’t. It’s a Balatro-fied coin pusher roguelike that’ll keep you chasing the highs of raining coins for hours on end.
Stop lying to yourselves, folks. You know that coin pushing game in the old school arcade from your childhood? You know, the one where you insert a coin, it falls onto a stack of coins, and a little shelf pushes the stack into an even bigger stack of coins in hopes that they fall into a pit and you get all the tickets in the world? Yeah, you’re not meant to win. That game is meant to take all your coins and give you that delicious thing we call hope.
RACCOIN by developer Doraccoon taps into the same dopamine-hitting, roguelike deckbuilding, and high-score chasing gameplay loop as LocalThunk’s Balatro. It involves a simple premise that many players (well, probably 90s-and-older-kids) are already familiar with: Play a coin pusher arcade machine, choose some reality-bending upgrades, and get high scores. That’s it. There’s no gotcha-level nonsense. No complex controls. No weird mechanics that are poorly explained. Just get increasingly high scores by pushing coins off the shelf.
There’s a clear Balatro-fication of the coin pusher game present in RACCOIN. After selecting a character (The Manager, to start), I’m presented with a familiar high-score-chasing challenge involving dropping in coins. I get 20 coins to drop while the shelf moves in hopes of hitting a very achievable score. Doing so brings up a store screen where I can buy prizes (consumables that can modify other coins in the machine and/or the machine itself), chips (ongoing artifacts that add mostly positive bonus effects), and coins that function separately from the default copper coins I get every round. The coins I can buy are one-time use but can made some delightful chaos: The “Relicoin” is worth +15 when scored while a “Bunny” coin can hop around and replicate itself like actual bunnies.
Unsurprisingly, RACCOIN becomes its most chaotically satisfying when coins drop into the bin and rack up increasingly high scores with +1 and +5 and +100 numbers that fly across the screen. Successful deployment of the store-bought coins help boost the score modifier, resulting in a spin-the-wheel moment of fun that can turn my misfortune into massive fortune. If I’m lucky enough to hit the rare segments of the wheel, a massive coin tower spawns in the middle of the cabinet. Knocking that tower down with a well-timed coin is a chef’s kiss of delight.
Once I’m out of in-hand coins, though…RACCOIN gives me the fewest of last changes. Exchanging my hard-earned green tickets gives me only 10 more coins I can use to push some coins from the top shelf in hopes of hitting the needed high score of my round. I can only use that Exchange function a few times per round before I’m allowed to violently shake the cabinet just once. After my exchanges are up…the run is over and I must start anew.
My first few rounds of RACCOIN didn’t feel rewarding. This is definitely by design and part of that traditional punishment of playing a roguelike, but that punishment thankfully did not last long. Figuring out how to best spend my tickets from scoring points and using coins effectively became key to advancing to some of the higher rounds. Hitting the double-digit rounds unlocked new characters with special passives that take advantage of uniquely themed coins in the shop.
RACCOIN’s progression feels slow, but that shouldn’t be reason to critique the game’s quality. Unsuccessful runs will show the little raccoon Trader walking slowly along a path, increasing his pace when achieving a high score on a run. With the unlock breakpoints being high and the Manager making miniscule progress along that little bar, it ends up feeling like a legitimate grind is needed to get new content. What makes things feel less valuable is those rewards: Having to complete multiple runs to get a new coin machine color or a single point to increase the Wheel’s rewards feels…well, lackluster. What’s missing here is the other unlockable content (like prizes, chips, and new coins) that are quietly unlocked during a run yet briefly shown on the end-run screen.
Perhaps some of my disgruntled complaints could be alleviated by a bigger celebration of unlocking new effects, or perhaps having more goals to achieve beyond. Anything that reminds me of making progress and celebrating those small steps would be beneficial, easing the frustration of losing a run.
Like Balatro, RACCOIN relies on unlocking more and more and more variables that broadly change up each run to maintain novelty and freshness. Many of these unlocks are simply unlocked by playing the game, while a select few rely on successful runs. In theory, that should mean that players are rewarded for playing how they like and discovering new content on their own. In practice, though, the overreliance on content that’s unlocked randomly takes away from the chase of novel playstyles and setting concrete goals.
Looking beyond that lack of player agency, though, RACCOIN is far from frustrating. It’s oh-so satisfying when things pop off. It keeps the player engaged with drip-fed rewards and big flashing numbers that give just enough dopamine to add more coin over, over, and over again. Publisher Playstack was not lying when they warned me that RACCOIN will cause me to clear my professional and free time during my review period. If it wasn’t for needing to have this review written by the game’s launch, I probably would be stuck trying to get a massive high score and successfully complete a run with my favorite animal character.
If you’ve ever wanted to feel satisfaction from a coin pushing machine, RACCOIN: Coin Pusher Roguelike will give you the hope, joy, and endless chaos that the real thing couldn’t. It’s a Balatro-fied coin pusher roguelike that’ll keep you chasing the highs of raining coins for hours on end.
