It’s early doors, but 2026 may be the biggest bin fire of a year in my lifetime. Wars starting, then ending, then starting again in the course of a week. People running their cars on hopes and dreams because a tank of petrol costs more than the vehicle. Manospheric morons making millions. Several depressing celebrity deaths before I’ve so much as eaten my first Creme Egg of the year.
I had no idea that the antidote to my anxiety and rage would be a cheap little title, made by two French blokes, in what I usually regard as the most turgid gaming genre. Retro Rewind is the moment’s indie darling, selling more than 100,000 copies on Steam in a week. In it, you run a video rental shop in the 90s. You need to buy videos. Display them well. Drop flyers. Serve your customers. Buy more stuff. It’s no different from any other retail sim out there, and I normally shun them because I play video games to escape the boring world of work and into an exciting one of dragons, aliens, and being brilliant at sports.
But Retro Rewind promised some choice 90s nostalgia. That was enough for me.
double quotation markI’d love to find out whether the devs used a random word generator, or were just high
Apparently, it’s realistic. My wife works in retail and she was nodding sagely as I was complaining about people getting arsey about late fees, phones ringing when I am busy on the till, and inconsiderate customers who haven’t rewound their tape, or want to mix the colours of their Slurpee.
‘It gets a lot of little cosmetic things right.’ Photograph: Blood Pact Studios
There’s a lot to get done every day, but this isn’t stressfully pacy, like Overcooked. The pace is demanding but manageable, and that’s important because any nostalgic game like this relies on a feeling of comfort. It gets a lot of little cosmetic things right, particularly the sounds: the whirr of a tape rewinding, the ding as you slide it across the scanner, the clunk as you drop it on the counter. Digital media does not have clunks. It isn’t remotely tactile. Sure, you can download Crimson Desert on day one without putting on pants, but I miss the feeling of shoving a CD into a slot and feeling the machine grip it and gently pull it in. I reckon I could happily fill an hour just stuffing disks into an Amiga.
That said, outside of the video rental-shop setting, Retro Rewind has nothing to say about the rest of the 90s. There are no jokes about Oasis or Blur, no baggy jeans or lurid sportswear. But it does pay tribute to the grubbiness of the 90s adult video market. A calendar alerts you to local events that might fuel desire for certain movie genres, and you can order stock to meet this demand – but two days a week a dodgy bloke also lingers in your back alley offering you nudie videos with titles such as Heirloom in My Mouth, Wash My Smoke and Grip My Cigarette By the Tip.
‘Twice a week, a dodgy bloke lingers in your back alley.’ Photograph: Blood Pact Studios
I’d love to find out whether the devs used a random word generator or were just high, because all the movie titles in the game are nuts. We have sci-fi flicks called Black Hole Loaf and Space Pod Code Name Couch, dramas called Letting Our Performer Go and T Rex Gone With the Wind. There’s a romance called Can the Couch Feel Me and a huge number of titles, in every genre, that allude to cigarettes, Intergalactic Tobacco, Tobacco Boxing and Cigarette Shark Bait being three more examples. This is what the world was like before the indoor smoking ban.
Retro Rewind’s appeal is more than 90s-specific nostalgia. This is nostalgia for the analogue life; for simple tasks with predictable outcomes; for working hard and reaping predictable rewards in a job that isn’t about to be taken by AI. This is escapism into the last decade that felt safe. We thought Bush, Berlusconi and Blair were bad, but they seem cute and cuddly compared to the ghoulish monsters in control today. And it is a game made by two developers, not a globe-spanning, highly optimised collective of a thousand people funded by Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner. Fourteen quid and it’s yours. It is so completely at odds with our times, unyoked to the runaway horse of greed, that it actually feels quite zeitgeisty.
It has made me feel all of this without actually being a brilliant game. It is not nearly as ambitious, wide-ranging and witty as Arcade Paradise, the last retail simulator I played. In terms of gameplay, it’s not much more complicated than moving sand around in one of those zen play pits. It doesn’t have the greatest graphics, and it could lean more confidently into quirkiness. I’d like to see more sidequesty things, too, though the early success of the game means that might yet happen.
Despite my misgivings, though, I can say with my hand on my heart, Retro Rewind feels like the greatest game on the planet to play right now.