When you strike gold, you often find more nearby. That’s the hope for PlayStack, it would seem, who are back with their next publishing attempt after Balatro. In an attempt to hold onto the bottled lightning of ‘hypnotic twist on a classic’ with Raccoin — Doraccoon’s twist on coin-pusher machines.
To say that I’ve been playing Raccoin ‘a fair bit’ would be a massive understatement. I’m now at a point where I’ve fully unlocked everything in the playtest build, and yet still keep booting it up. It has the compulsive loop of the 2p coin-pusher machines that have inspired it, however it’s got the wacky-fun exponential chaos factor that can only come with a video game overlay. In this case it’s combos, boost coins, and magic prizes. Yet, much like Balatro before it, the core of the activity does remain as a constant — but, your coin pusher will almost certainly end up filled with white holes, leaping frogs and little piggies at some point.
Structurally, it’s all incredibly familiar, which isn’t a thing that should take away from it — after all, its bedfellow has easily been one of the biggest games in recent memory. Raccoin tasks you to take on a machine of your choosing at a stake of your choosing, with increasing difficulties and twists coming with them. The big difference here is that there are characters who you embody, and those characters define the bonus coins and key-ring attachments that are available during your run. If you play as the biologist then you can get animal tokens, which have a whole Hunt and Breeding mechanic tied to them that works fantastically once you get it going.
However, the main problem with this playtest —which is open, you just have to apply — is that it feels too easy. It’s incredibly fun, but I haven’t actually failed a run so far, be that because of the mega-coin towers or the incredibly powerful special prizes. At ten runs, and without a way to continue beyond that, the target points never get as exponentially high as to seem impossible at a glance, and — for me — the real charm of Balatro was 1) Stupid combos (which Raccoin has in spades), and the rush from accomplishing impossible-seeming goals.
I can only recommend the Raccoin playtest — it’s truly exceptional. However, it feels a little too early to tell if PlayStack have managed to bottle lightning again. Time will tell.
Raccoin is currently available to play via an open playtest on Steam
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