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 have 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).

Get ready to make a LOT of change.

Credit: Blood Pact Studios

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 into 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.

As the days go on, you’ll slowly unlock minor variations in this seemingly inexorable cycle. A new video release day, for instance, might mean moving the old copies of “Forward to the Past” to the bargain bin in order to make room on the shelves for new copies of “Die Trying” (the parody film titles are hit-or-miss, but can have their own nostalgic appeal). And fixing the slushy machine behind the counter means getting occasional breaks from making change to spend a small 15-second mini-game making a snack for a customer.

Ho ho ho, Merry Xmas.

Credit: Blood Pact Studios

The most significant improvement you’ll eventually unlock is the ability to hire staff, granting you some blessed relief from the drudgery of your daily in-game tasks (this probably says something about the nature of minimum wage employment, but I digress). The game makes some extremely vague gestures toward the idea of employee management, occasionally asking you to approve raises, let employees call out sick, wake them up when they fall asleep on the job, or risk their resignation by asking them to pick up the pace. But since you can fire an employee and hire a new one instantly without any apparent penalty, this bit of simulation feels more than a bit shallow.

Miles wide, inches deep

Employee management isn’t the only area where the game seems to lack depth. Overall, there just aren’t a lot of interesting business decisions to be made in Retro Rewind. You can’t set prices or late fees to try to maximize profits, for instance, or set up a budget for advertising to try to attract new business. And while the game says that things like movie selection and decorations have some impact on how busy the store will get, there isn’t a lot in the way of granular feedback to determine what’s working and what isn’t.

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