If you worked as a retailer at a movie rental store in the early ’90s, there’s a good chance you couldn’t wait to end the day and escape the daily grind with a mindless video game. Here in the 2020s, on the other hand, at least one mindless video game strives to recreate the daily grind of working at a video rental store.
Retro Rewind: Video Store Simulator is the latest in a burgeoning field of “job simulators” that has found indie success on Steam. And while the depth of the game’s overall retail simulation is fairly shallow, there’s a kind of comforting and zen to be found in the repetitive nostalgia of that slavish, everyday world of the past.
Working from 9 to 5
Unlike simulations that rely heavily on menus or spreadsheets, retro rewind puts you in the first-person perspective of the manager of a small VHS rental store circa 1990. That means you have to run around doing everything from buying the tapes to setting up the furniture and decorating the store. And while you can technically display those tapes on any shelf you want, grouping them by genre improves the customer experience and helps silence those organizational voices that hold you back in your head.
Once the store is set up, the mind-numbing repetitiveness of the daily routine quickly sets in. Each day in the game is primarily filled by alternating between two main tasks: running the cash register (i.e. scanning items, taking cash from customers, and making change from the cash register) or restocking returns (picking up videos from the returns bin, scanning them, and returning them to the shelves in groups of 10 at a time).
Get ready to make A LOT of changes.
Credit: Blood Pact Studios
Get ready to make A LOT of changes.
Credit: Blood Pact Studios
Each individual action described above requires enough specific mouse movement and clicking that you can’t commit it to muscle memory; here you don’t need to hold down a single button to automate any process. And every job has enough mental demands and random interruptions to keep you from going into “brain release” autopilot. You never know when you’ll have to stick a returned tape into the (too slow) rewinding machine, for example, or go fetch a specific tape reservation for a customer, or rush back to take a phone call.
