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 decent chance you couldn’t wait to clock out for the day and escape from the daily grind with a mindless video game. Here in the 2020s, on the other hand, at least one mindless video game is striving to re-create the daily grind of working at a video rental store.

Retro Rewind: Video Store Simulator is the latest in a burgeoning field of “work simulators” that has found indie success on Steam. And while the depth of the game’s overall retail simulation is pretty shallow, there is a sort of soothing, zen comfort to be found in the repetitive nostalgia of that menial workaday world of the past.

Working 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 local VHS rental joint circa 1990. That means you have to run around doing everything from buying the tapes to laying out the furniture and decorations in the store. And while you can technically display those tapes out on any shelf you want, grouping them together by genre makes for both a better customer experience and helps to quiet those anal-retentive organizational voices in your head.

Once the store is set up, the mind-numbing repetitiveness of the daily routine quickly sets in. Each in-game day is primarily filled by switching between two main tasks: manning the cash register (i.e., scanning items, taking customer cash, and making change from the register) or reshelving returns (picking up videos from the return bin, scanning them in, 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 quite commit it to muscle memory—there’s no holding down a single button to automate any processes here. And each job has just enough mental requirements and randomized interruptions to prevent you from going into full “brain off” autopilot. You never know when you’re going to have to stick a returned tape in the (all too slow) rewinding machine, for instance, or go grab a specific tape reservation for a customer, or run to the back to field a phone call.