For anyone who played games in the arcades way back in the day, it’s no surprise that the majority of them were designed to be inherently hard. If the goal of an arcade unit was to maximize profits, it’s obvious that you would want the degree of challenge to your game to be relatively high, since if people stayed on it too long you could be losing money. The problem was trying to balance that difficulty with some bells and whistles, or some sort of other incentive to then keep people wanting to play it, since if the experience was no fun nobody would feed it their quarters in the first place. This delicate balance was a tough one, with far more classic arcade games generally failing at the challenge than being successful.

Now, when it comes to a modern console game that’s looking to recapture the essence of titles like those classics the challenge and stakes are different. While there’s no need to be concerned with turning over players to maximize profits, there’s still an expectation of a certain level of old-school challenge to make games that feel like they could have been in the arcades back in the day. This retro arcade space on the Switch has actually seen some excellent examples of titles that haven’t just looked the part, but have even felt as if they could have been contemporaries in that age. But while Super Spy Racoon certainly looks the part, and some of its play elements do have hints of familiarity to them, its pretty punishing nature makes it feel like a game that would have likely been avoided back in the arcade days.

In the end this is a very stealth-oriented title, with your goal being to grab a variety of documents on each of the game’s 5 stages while avoiding being detected. The thing is, you’ll quickly find that’s much easier said than done, as the further along you go the more layers of concerns you’ll find you’ll have. The first challenge I bumped up against is simply that learning the specifics of how you can be detected by different means, and what their limitations may be, isn’t always completely clear. Some trial and error isn’t unusual in some games though, so while this was sometimes irksome it wasn’t a deal killer. The real trick to success is often understanding which things you’ll be able to grab more easily, and which you’ll need to try to get while you use a stage power-up that will temporarily make you invisible (though still at risk if you aren’t careful).

While I have no doubt that there’ll be some people who will dig this challenge, there are some elements to it that don’t quite add up in my mind. My first thought is that the way the game is structured, it feels far more like a traditional game you’d seek to “beat” than is typical for an arcade-style title. Given the learning curve, the degree of trial and error it takes to work out patterns, and the need to optimize your runs to guarantee success, it doesn’t feel like something you’d want to return to endlessly for enjoyment. The goal feels like something you’d more just want to “conquer” and be done with. 

In the end, I also don’t see a balance here. The game feels like a lot of stick and not much carrot at all, aside from the desire to beat it. Without there being an easily identifiable element of fun to be had, and just a desire to compete on the leaderboards, it feels like a niche within a niche at best. With quite a few retro titles already out there that manage to better balance creativity, nostalgia, fun, and difficulty more effectively, this feels like a tough sell.