Oh, to be a 1990s video store clerk—nerding out on new release sci-fi movies, helping yourself to a slurpee from your store’s new machine, and whiling away the quiet customer-less hours working on the script that’s going to make you Hollywood royalty. Honestly, life would be just peachy—if it wasn’t for the guy at the end of the counter wanting a recommendation for an old drama with good reviews, and the person at the checkout who wants a slurpee with ALL FIVE FLAVORS, and the person next in line complaining about a late fee… and, oh god, now the phone’s ringing.
Welcome to the world of Retro Rewind, the latest in a series of “simulator” games that reinvent mundane jobs as entertainment. It puts you in the shoes of someone who’s just opened a video store in a suburban open-air mall in the fall of 1990. Your basic task is to man the checkout—you scan customers’ rentals, take their money, and give them the correct change. Easy, right?
© Blood Pact StudiosOf course, things aren’t that simple—as the game progresses, more and more demands accumulate on your time. There’s checking in the previous day’s returns (be kind, rewind!), ordering new releases and managing the store’s inventory, dealing with late fees and broken tapes, buying clandestine dirty movies from the creepy dude who appears at the back door on Tuesdays, and so on. Thankfully, the game gives you a grace period at the start of every morning to get your house—well, ok, shop—in order: the day doesn’t start until you activate the “open” sign in the window, which means you can take as long as you want to check in the returns waiting for you, order new furniture and decorations, etc.
While the setting of Retro Rewind could hardly be more quintessentially American if it tried, curiously enough, this game reminds me of the excellent indie game Papers, Please, which, if you’re not familiar, revolves around checking passports at the border of a depressing fictional Soviet republic. Clearly, the two games have very different aesthetics, but both start with a simple task—checking out videos and checking people’s passports, respectively—and then add layer upon layer of complication to make that task increasingly challenging and frustrating.
Speaking of aesthetics, Retro Rewind’s graphics are … idiosyncratic. Some details are absolutely on point—the store decorations, the video covers, the MS-DOS fonts used for some of the UI elements. The character models, though, range from disconcerting to flat-out terrifying—all the more incentive to get them through the checkout and out the door, I guess. Elsewhere, someone clearly had themselves a great time creating the names of all the fictional films on offer: some of the highlights include Steven Left Me For The Couch (terrible reviews!), Basement Bread Torture (inexplicably, a critical favorite), and Two Ladies for One Jester (hey, your kinks are your kinks).
© Blood Pact StudiosAll in all, the game pretty much nails its niche (so much so that its Steam forums have spawned multiple threads from former employees of Blockbuster Video—some reminiscing about the good times, others semi-seriously accusing the game of inducing PTSD.) As a mid-priced distraction from the ills of the 2020s, it’s well worth your time.
English (US) ·