This game is really fun — until around the 15–20 hour mark.
That’s roughly the point where you’ll hit the max level and have basically everything unlocked. At first, it’s really fun. You’ll take your time designing everything and making it just right, like the video stores you may or may not remember from your childhood.
But once you’ve unlocked everything, you’ll mostly be hunting for achievements. I’ve gotten every achievement except one: owning 1,000 videos in your store.
And you’ll soon realize that this one is a real hassle to get.
After around 15 hours, I had unlocked Level 24, bought most of the video collections from the market, bought every video from the black-market dealer, and bought at least 10–20 copies of every new release whenever they became available. Yet I was still only roughly above halfway toward the last achievement.
At that point, I had everything organized into their respective categories, etc. But after buying every unique movie in bulk, you eventually just stop organizing everything. You buy as many shelves as possible and start dumping everything into them.
And you think that’s bad?
Well, your poor workers can barely keep up with the return station. Both of them basically need to work there constantly just to make a dent in the pile. You basically NEED two workers who work "fast" and are thick skinned, since you constantly need to scream at them just to work faster.
That leaves you doing everything else: working the cash register, refilling shelves, fixing broken VHS tapes, renting out VHS players, giving recommendations to customers, handing out reserved movies, and answering the phone, which you also have to attend to from time to time.
I like this game. I really do. I can absolutely recommend it to anyone who enjoys childhood nostalgia or just wants a fun and cool simulator game.
Yet I still think it needs quite a few improvements:
- Workers sometimes randomly get stuck and stop working. No, they aren’t asleep. I genuinely mean that they get stuck in the most random places, and it’s not because of the decorations.
- Worker speed doesn’t really feel like worker speed. Even when a worker is “fast” in one of the two categories, they still work really, really slowly. They basically just walk faster.
- The 1,000-video achievement makes the return station problem much worse. If you’re going for the 1,000 VHS achievement, you’ll eventually have so many returned tapes that even both of your fastest workers can’t process them in a single workday. The pile just grows infinitely, meaning you either have to help them or wait around for them to finish.
- If you don’t help them and let both workers focus entirely on returns, most of your shelves will be empty by around Day 3 or Day 4 because they simply aren’t fast enough.
- The return station in general is a hassle because it’s just so slow.
- I’d really like to see skill points or some kind of worker progression system. Maybe workers could gain experience the longer they stay employed and eventually unlock skill points. They could become faster, more resilient, need to call the manager less often, etc.
- Maybe add a third or even fourth worker? It would also be nice to have another activity to assign them to, such as handling reserved movies, giving recommendations, or dealing with customers at the service counter. That way, you could have two workers at the return station, one as a cashier, and one handling the “service” side of things, including bringing broken movies to the back.
Now you might be thinking: “But what the heck am I supposed to do then, besides refilling shelves, fixing things, answering the phone, and decorating/sorting?”
HA! Glad you asked.
- A second store, maybe? Something like renting out video games and consoles, music discs, or perhaps even DVDs later in the game. The black-market dealer already hints at DVDs, so it could be a cool late-game addition. Since the game is called Retro Rewind and not Retro VHS, there’s plenty of room to expand into other kinds of retro media.
- The pay feels pretty stagnant. It always seems to hover around 600–800, depending on the weekday or which event is currently active. It would be nice to have some more progression there.
- A better way of sorting videos would be amazing. Maybe add a button that automatically sorts a shelf alphabetically. Or, for “mixed” shelves, which I currently have nine of, have the option to automatically sort the videos by genre and then alphabetically.
- Customers need to learn how queues work. They’ll sometimes stand as far away as possible when they need a random recommendation, even though another customer is already at the service station. Like, buddy, just stand in line. It’s not that hard man xD
I’ve now reached the 27-hour mark, and I still don’t have enough tapes for the achievement ;(
Overall, though, I really like Retro Rewind. I just hope the late-game progression gets some attention, because once you’ve unlocked everything, the 1,000 video achievement turns what was a relaxing and nostalgic game into a BIT of a grind.
