It’s 1:38 AM on a Tuesday and I have to go to sleep.
I have a love/hate relationship with Raccoin.
I love that it captures that sadistic feeling I had as a teen standing in front of the coin pusher because I had that shit figured out. Just tapping on the glass, aiming with millimeter precision on all three sides (and above and below) and then blocking anyone else from using it like a grandmother at the casino because, fuckers, I KNEW that one coin would eventually get enough gravitational influence and drop.
I hate that it.. well, read the ramble I just wrote above.
This game captures all of that, and yet it throws in a roguelike overlay to keep me coming back for 15 more runs.
As a teen I recall walking around my local mall arcade from coin pusher to coin pusher, putting my hand in the tray at the bottom and discovering some token that dropped on its own without anyone else realizing it. Like clockwork, it usually happened around 3:20 PM, after the lunch takers had spent their coins and gone back to work, leaving the overflowing pusher ready to explode. I would book to the mall from high school and hang out for a couple of hours, with at least 30-40 minutes surviving on the tokens that were miraculously left for me by Arcade Jesus. That coin pusher was great for us lower middle class kids, providing both free money (!) and also our very early tastes of gambling.
It was very, very easy to get addicted to it, and kids especially didn’t know when to stop.
Thankfully I had developed a method, an almost superhuman skill to be able to knock at least a few bits of copper (or heavy plastic, probably) into the tray each time I played. It was skill, I’d tell people.
None of that, and all of that, translates into Raccoin. This fucking game. It honestly doesn’t need much of a description or huge thematic think piece as a review. It’s a coin pusher with roguelike elements that let us choose to add specific coins that can change values or blow shit up. Win enough coins to move on to the next round, or spend all of it in the endless mode.
That’s it, really. It’s a simple idea, with enough stuff to engage us. But it’s those stupid little IRL-adjacent moments that are so beneficial to this experience that make this game so mind-bogglingly right.
The other day I was playing it on the Steam Deck (it’s not the best place to play it, tbh, because the text is so small) and after using up all of my coins and falling a few short of the goal I was about to start a new run. Before doing so I set down the device to do something, thinking the Deck would just turn itself off after my usual 15 minutes of inactivity, and inadvertently didn’t come back for at least an hour. When I did, when I had glanced over at the coffee table and saw the Deck still running, I saw that one magical coin had eventually let itself loose thanks to the game’s magnificently annoyingly accurate physics and set the wheels in motion to drop several coins and hit my goal. All by accident.
I had walked around the arcade, reached into the coin pusher tray, and found enough coins had fallen on their own to keep myself going.
Raccoin is that. I hate it. I love it so much.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. This video first appeared on The SideQuest Live for April 16, 2026.
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