This game about running a '90s video rental store is the first job sim to really grab me since Schedule 1

I've played a bunch of retail job simulators, and something you can almost always count on is a bit of a slow start. Your store is empty, you have a limited budget, you have sparse inventory options, and there's a learning curve that means it takes a good half-hour, at least, until you've got your bearings.

But Retro Rewind - Video Store Simulator gets rolling immediately. Order some random VHS videos from your old computer and they're delivered instantly. Plop down a couple of shelves and stock them with weird sounding movies like "A Scientist and his Sailor" and "The Dessert that Followed You Home." Open the doors and people begin strolling in immediately to rent some tapes. Within a minute or two of starting the game, you're already up and running.

And the 1990's themed video rental store sim is a welcome throwback for me because I worked in a video rental store in the '90s, which is neither as much fun nor as boring as it sounds. Yeah, I could watch movies while I worked, but my coworkers had terrible taste in films—and there honestly wasn't that much time to watch them anyway because renting movies was pretty much all people did every night in the '90s. The store was always busy.

The gameplay loop in Retro Rewind is oddly transfixing: I booted it up to take a quick look today and before I knew it 90 minutes had passed and I hadn't taken my eyes off the screen once. Every morning, empty the returns bin, scan all the tapes, rewind the ones the laziest customers didn't, and restock the shelves by hand. Order some new movies for the store if possible, especially if there are new releases you can get multiple copies of. Work the register as people check out their rentals, take their cash, count out their change, and suggest movies to people who need a bit of help deciding.

In between all that there are more returns waiting to be checked in and reshelved, people calling the store to reserve movies, flyers to hand to people outside your shop in the hopes of luring them in, and even snack and drink machines to manage so people can order food along with their films.

This is a busy, bustling, hands-on game that reminds me a bit of Schedule 1 (in part because the character have a similar cartoony look), and the day just whooshes by. Before you know it, it's closing time and you're ordering new tapes, stocking new shelves, and maybe ducking out into the back alley to see if you can score black market bootlegs from a mysterious vendor.

Adult films? Oh, you betcha. In my new store I've got a shelf set up in the very back for porn—and if you're under a certain age, yeah, people used to rent porn on videotape by going up to the counter and handing the no-doubt embarrassingly titled movies to the clerk. In the store I worked in, we rented a lot of porn. Every transaction with a customer renting adult videos felt essentially as if they were announcing "Hi, I'm going to take this tape home and immediately masturbate to it" and me trying to maintain a neutral expression because I'm a deeply awkward person.

My new shop is only just getting started but I'm already deeply invested in Retro Rewind. I want to earn enough to hire a couple of employees so I don't have to do absolutely everything myself. I want to cover the walls with movie posters and the floor with bright, tacky carpeting.

And I want to have a nice big selection of adult films in my shop because that's just how it was back then. Want to watch a dirty movie? Leave the house, head to the store, and let a random clerk know exactly what it was you want to spank it to. Look, I'm glad those days are over, but I'm having fun reliving them in Retro Rewind.