Even in these heady days of abundant roguelites, I still believe we—as a gaming generation—have forgotten the brutality of arcade games. Those enormous cabinets were designed to stare back at us through their matted screens, watching us fail again and again and again. Because every time we did, we forked over another quarter.

Poosh XL is a short, sharp callback to those days, a game that’s about sudden, merciless failure combined with an all-consuming compulsion to have another go. It’s a very simple conceit: An upside-down, pendulum-like arrow perpetually swings back and forth from your little neon ship, and when you click (or press the A button), it flies forward in the direction of the arrow. If you crash into anything, including walls, stationary obstacles, and moving enemies, you immediately die. And that’s it. It is, indeed, a one-button game.

And it’s enough. Your pendulum-arrow (pendarrow? arrowulum?) charges up between moves, meaning the longer you leave it, the farther you’ll travel, which cleverly reminds you that you’re not in a rush. It’s tempting to try to fly forward as fast as you can and maintain momentum, taking your next move before the drift of the last has slowed to a stop. But this always leads to disaster, and you’re far better off playing calmly and methodically. There’s no time limit beyond those of brief bonus skills, which you pick up by flying through floating items. Beyond taking advantage of brief invulnerability or extra travel distance, you’ll want to take your time.

Each failed attempt leaves a marker on the course, letting you feel victorious as you cross it on a later attempt as well as offering a similar goal post for your furthest ever distance. This works as an excellent motivator because an embarrassingly early failure offers an early pick-me-up as you soar ahead of yourself.

The game’s Geometry Wars aesthetics are no coincidence either. There are a fair few borrowed ideas here, including gravitational wells from some obstacles, all very nicely represented in the crisp, clear graphics. 

Alongside the Survival mode are a series of Challenges that provide a shorter course and then time how long it takes you to complete it. Or, if you’re me, just pointlessly times how long it takes you to fail to reach the goal due to your inherent ineptness. I swear sometimes it feels like my subconscious is just aiming for the obstacles.

These provide excellent solace from repeated uselessness at one level, letting you take a break and be useless at another level for a bit.

The most important thing about Poosh is that it’s just a lot of fun. That might sound overly simplistic, but it’s really core to arcade gaming: Is it fun to just pick up and play? Would you immediately want to stick in another quarter? And Poosh absolutely passes this test with flying colors. In fact, it seems such a shame that this isn’t in arcade cabinets across the length of the country. Someone do that for me.