Retro Rewind re-creates the glorious drudgery of working a ’90s video store

If you were working 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 come and escape the daily hassle with a mindless video game. On the other hand, in the 2020s, at least one goofy video game is attempting to recreate the daily process of working at a video rental store.

Retro Rewind: Video Store Simulator is the latest in the emerging field of “work simulators” that have found indie success on Steam. And while the depth of the game’s overall retail simulation is pretty shallow, a kind of soothing, zen comfort can be found in the repetitive nostalgia of that small-scale working world of yesteryear.

working from 9 to 5

Unlike simulations that rely heavily on menus or spreadsheets, retro rewind Places you in the first-person perspective of the manager of a small local VHS rental joint circa 1990. This means you’ll have to run around doing everything from buying tape to placing furniture and decorations in the store. And while you can technically display those tapes on any shelf you want, grouping them together by genre improves the customer experience and helps quiet those anal-retentive organizational voices in your head.

Once the store is set up, the mind-numbing repetition of daily routines quickly begins. Each day in the game is filled primarily by switching between two main tasks: organizing the cash register (i.e., scanning items, taking customer cash, and taking change from the register) or reordering returns (picking up videos from the returns bin, scanning them, and running them back to the shelves in groups of 10 at a time).

Each individual action described above requires just enough specific mouse movement and clicking that you can’t commit it to muscle memory – there’s no need to hold down a single button to automate any process here. And each task has enough mental requirements and random interruptions to keep you from going into full “brain off” autopilot. For example, you never know when you’ll have to stick a returned tape into the (very slow) rewinding machine, or make a specific tape reservation for a customer, or run to the back to field a phone call.