Rentals were a big part of my childhood, right up until early adulthood. They’re not coming back, not while even casual gamers have access to hundreds or thousands of games online. Paying $8 for a three-day rental sounds ludicrous today when that price could get me a full game to keep. But it was a good experience while it lasted. Having more isn’t always better. Things lose their meaning and value when they’re plentiful.

Anyway, that’s a long way of saying that I’m nostalgic for those days, which is why something like Retro Rewind is so appealing to me. Retail sims are having a moment right now, with games like Supermarket Simulator and Gas Station Simulator finding big success. I like the formula, honestly. Not in any major way, and I found Supermarket Simulator got pretty old fast, mainly because it was unimaginative and my own, powerful imagination wasn’t enough to prop it up.

So, out of the gate, Retro Rewind has two things going for it, but will it be penalized for being late (to the game)?

SUGARBUNS

Retro Rewind is exactly what it says in its marketing copy. You run a rental store. Which, hold on, do I need to explain rentals to a younger audience?

Back in my day, there were stores that stocked movies. You could “rent” these movies for a period of time. Like a library, but angrier. A lot of the smaller places just let you borrow overnight, but places like Blockbuster (the biggest name in video rental) would let you borrow for three or even seven days. If you were late, you were typically charged a fee, and this was different depending on the place. Some would compound over time, so if you brought it back a month later, you’d be hit with a huge bill. Some were easy-going about it, others would charge you if you were even an hour late.

In Retro Rewind, you stock movies. It’s not really all that different from Supermarket Simulator. You buy shelves, put movies on them, decorate, build up your store as it grows, and so on. The biggest divergence is that your stock comes back to you in Retro Rewind. Speaking of which, you have to check each movie back in individually, and sometimes rewind the tapes if someone was unkind.

I never worked in a rental store, but this is generally how I imagine things would be. Tapes will even come back broken occasionally, which puts a black splotch on the customer’s account. The degenerate bastards.

THE CRIME AND THE FINE

You start out with only a few genres, and you get more as you gain experience and level up. That sounds kind of dumb, but in terms of progression, it makes a lot of sense. It means you can keep things easily sorted in individual sections, and buy new shelves as new genres get released.

Beyond genre, you can also see the critic rating or if the movie is “old.” A decent QOL feature is that you can see these just by looking at the tape, it’s not like you have to memorize them by title or open its info screen. However, these extra qualifiers disappear while you’re holding the tape, which is sort of weird. Actually, that’s really weird. I bet that gets changed in a later patch.

Old movies are rented for cheaper, and I believe the critic rating affects the likelihood that someone will rent it. However, some people actually come looking for bad movies (as they should), so they’re not necessarily worth throwing out. I liked having them all in one big “Trash” section. That makes me feel good.

HAVE YOU CHECKED OUR TRASH SECTION?

You can buy tapes individually off the marketplace, but that’s expensive. It’s better to just pick up some of the lots that show up, which will be, like 10 tapes for $100. They’ll either be random or from a specific genre, and, at most, there will be three lots each day. You can also order tapes from the “Black Market” by inputting a known SKU (69696969 doesn’t get you anything, I tried), but that’s crazy expensive, and I’m not entirely certain of why you’d want to do that. Like, none of your customers care if you have a specific generic title. They never ask.

But the best way to get new tapes is from this guy who shows up in the back alley every Tuesday and Thursday. He carries bootlegs that sell for much less than a normal copy and are otherwise indistinguishable. But most importantly, he has the adult videos. Adult videos don’t come in random lots, so it’s important to get them when you can because… Well, who doesn’t want to have more porn lying around? Especially in 1990 when the internet wasn’t really as world-wide or webby as it is now.

There are new release tapes that are specific movie parodies, but the bulk of your store will be filled with generic tapes that are randomly compiled. Their covers will be a mash of images pasted together, and the names will reference the images used. It results in some absolutely side-bursting titles like “The Breakfast That Followed You Home.” And you can buy movie posters to hang in your store that allow you to input a movie’s SKU to put its cover on the poster. So, I can put things like “Me Time with My Sofa” on the wall.

THE BREAKFAST THAT FOLLOWED YOU HOME

Retro Rewind is a pretty tight game. It doesn’t get over-ambitious with the formula, so it doesn’t feel like there’s any feature creep. However, some parts of it could be better.

For example, there’s no storage. So, if you have a glut of a certain genre, your options are to either force them out to any shelf they’ll fit on or literally just pile them on the floor. You can also sell them, but aside from clearing out your old new releases, I never saw the need to get rid of generic videos. It’s a strange omission, but the developer has released a post-release roadmap, which includes storage.

Another issue – and this might be a personal preference thing – is that you don’t have much control over the business end of things. You can’t edit the prices, and most of the actual store infrastructure can’t be changed. You decorate, but you can’t add a cash register or check-in station. So, your store is persistently bottlenecked behind this one check-out/in station. Essentially, you can only take in so much money a day, regardless of how big your store grows and how vast your selection.

Which also means you can’t really lose. Which, I get is kind of a thing for cozy games. There’s a philosophy that “winning slower” is a better punishment than straight-up losing, but I like to have skin in the game.

The only real decision you make in the game is whether or not to charge customers a fee for late or damaged returns. Like, on an individual level. You’ll have to look them in the eyes and tell them to cough it up. Generally, if they were apologetic, I might let it slide. Sometimes, I’d waive a fee, and they’d tell me it was a “wise choice” or something snarky, and at that point, I think Retro Rewind should allow me to reverse the decision and also punch them in the dick.

But also, some of them swear they’d never shop at my store again, and I don’t know if that’s true. Each NPC has a name and account number, but, in practice, it’s meaningless. You can’t see their purchase history, preferences, and whether this is the first tape they’ve broken. It doesn’t matter in the long run, but I’d love to have a list of customers who need to be welcomed with a dick punch.

MAKE IT A BLOCKBUSTER NIGHT

On one hand, I feel like there isn’t a tonne of actual meat to Retro Rewind. It’s not a terribly deep experience in a genre that rarely goes deep. Aside from decorating, there’s little that you have meaningful control of.

On the other hand, it does succeed in being a kind of relaxing experience without it feeling forced upon you. It’s not cute about it, it just provides you with an unabrasive experience and expects that its rental store atmosphere will be enough to keep you absorbed.

And it works. Retro Rewind accomplishes small things with accuracy. It doesn’t lean heavily on asset stores to fill out its world (though, I would like to talk to whoever made the arcade cabinets 3/4 scale on risers, wtf), it’s not as janky as a lot of its peers, and it maintains a tight scope. There are places where it can grow (they’re adding video game rental in the future), but not a whole lot to complain about. It might not blow you away, but it might suck you in. And it might also make you pine for the days of Blockbuster Video. We didn’t know how good we had it.

8/10

This review was conducted using a digital Steam copy of the game. It was paid for by the author.