If you worked a retail job at a movie rental store in the early ’90s, there’s a good chance you couldn’t wait for the day to escape the daily grind with a mindless video game. Here in the 2020s, on the other hand, at least one wacky video game is trying to recreate the day-to-day operation of a video rental store.
Retro Rewind: Video Store Simulator is the latest in the growing field of “job simulators”. An indie hit on Steam. While the depth of the game’s overall retail simulation is pretty shallow, there’s a kind of soothing, zen comfort in the repetitive nostalgia of that simple business world of yesteryear.
He works from 9 to 5
Unlike simulations based on menus or tables, Retro Rewind Introduces you to the first-person perspective of the manager of a small local VHS rental joint in 1990. This means you have to handle everything from buying tape to arranging furniture and decorations in the store. While you can technically display these tapes on any shelf you want, grouping them by genre both makes for a better customer experience and helps silence those anal-grabbing organizational voices in your head.
Once the store is set up, the mind-numbing repetition of the daily routine quickly sets in. Each in-game day is largely filled by switching between two main tasks: operating the cash register (ie scanning items, taking customer cash and changing from the register) or shuffling returns (retrieving videos from the takeout box, scanning them into groups of 10).
Be prepared to make a lot of changes.
Credit: Blood Pact Studios
Be prepared to make a lot of changes.
Credit: Blood Pact Studios
Each individual action described above requires quite a bit of specific mouse movement and clicking that you can’t commit to muscle memory – you can’t just hold down a button to automate any process. And each task has enough mental demands and random interruptions that you go into complete “brain-off” autopilot. You never know when you’ll need to stick a return tape into a (very slow) rewind machine, say pick up a special tape order for a customer, or run back to make a phone call.
