Unshine Arcade

What Unshine Arcade is

Unshine Arcade is a two-layer game from solo developer mardt. One layer is a top-down, procedurally generated stealth-shooter that you play inside an arcade cabinet — dash, shoot, stay quiet, get paid in tickets. The other layer is the arcade hall itself: a first-person, walkable building with shops, gacha machines, a claw machine, a prize cabinet with a virtual pet in it, and a story about what happened to the place.

Every run pays out tickets, and tickets are how the hall opens up: shops, upgrades, the pet, and the meta-progression that hides the game's real secrets. The developer describes the design as "an arcade game inside an arcade hall", and that loop — run, cash out, walk around, spend — is the whole game in one sentence.

Before you buy

• Release: September 28, 2026 on Steam (PC).
• Developer / publisher: mardt — a solo developer based in Utrecht, Netherlands.
• Price: not listed on the store page at the time of writing; check the Steam page on launch day.
• Demo: yes, and it is unusually well liked — 100% of the 18 user reviews for the demo are positive. The demo covers the ground floor and the first two rooms, plus two stages of the virtual pet.
• Languages: full audio and interface in English, Dutch, Japanese, Polish, Simplified Chinese and Russian. The 1.0.37 patch (October 13, 2026) added the Chinese and Japanese characters missing from earlier builds.

What to do first

1. Play a cabinet run before you spend anything. The top-down layer is where the mechanics live: movement, dashing, stealth and shooting. Your first runs are meant to be cheap — treat them as scouting missions.
2. Bank your tickets early on. Tickets are the only currency between the two layers. The shops on the arcade floor, the gacha machines and the virtual pet all take them, and the pet can ask for 750 tickets in a single feeding.
3. Open the console and look at what codes it offers. The current build lists available cheat codes directly in the console. Codes are meta-progression, not a punchline — they are found hidden across the arcade and typed in.

Which guide do I need?

FAQ

Is Unshine Arcade out yet? Yes — it launched on Steam on September 28, 2026 for PC.

Is there a demo? Yes, free on Steam. It contains the ground floor, the first two rooms and two virtual-pet stages, and its user rating sits at 100% positive from 18 reviews.

Do I need to play the top-down runs? They are the engine of the game — tickets come from runs, and tickets feed everything on the arcade floor. You can pace yourself, but you cannot skip the layer entirely.

Is the virtual pet mandatory? No, it is a ticket sink with a story attached. If you would rather save tickets for upgrades, you can — but the pet is one of the two meta-progression systems the developer points at.