Chuck E. Cheese

About

The honest framing first: this is an arcade with a play zone attached, not a playground that happens to have games. What puts it on this page is the Adventure Zone — an obstacle course plus a trampoline area with a height limit that keeps it to smaller children — and a superhero-themed climbing structure. If you are coming to climb rather than to tap a card against machines, you will run out of things to do well before the afternoon does.

Taken for what it is, the Paramus branch does the job. Parents who had not set foot in one for a decade describe it as brighter and better kept than they remembered, and a weekday visit after school lets out is genuinely quiet. Weekends are a different building. It runs more than twice as busy on Saturday and Sunday as it does midweek.

Three things come up again and again. The pizza costs more than it is worth, and plenty of families eat properly somewhere else afterwards. The prize counter is where the waiting happens, so redeem before the room fills rather than on your way out. And one Sunday morning a month runs with the lights and music turned down, which parents of autistic children single out.