Is it really that satisfying to sift through 3360 VHS cassettes carelessly scattered across a rather large retail space, and then manually stack them in order of their genre? And can you even tell what genre they are? As we know, genres can be subjective and blurry. Take, for instance, Orgazmo: an action-adventure-porno. Where do we place it, and where do we start in VHS World ‘89? From the start.
There is absolutely zero filler, no exposition, no objectives other than what you read on the Steam store page. You simply have to stack the tapes on numerous shelves in a Blockbuster-clone storefront. Already the number of tapes is overwhelming – much more than Tidy Mart – and on top of this, you have 14 genres to go through from anime to romance, crime to sports.
The biggest challenge in VHS World ‘89, a game by Indovers Studio, isn’t necessarily the sorting of genres (they’re colour-coded, after all), but whether you have the patience to stick with it. There are no timers, no side quests, no guidance, and no apparent rewards. It’s the repetition of picking up tapes, five at a time, then traipsing through the shop and stacking them while listening to the dreadful (as in accurate) 80s music. That’s not a negative – it’s spot on; I just don’t like the style, that’s all.
After placing well over 150 tapes, I accidentally pressed a button bringing up the skills menu. What an idiot. For every correctly placed title, you score a point that can unlock new skills that allow you to carry more tapes, to use a scanner to locate the remaining title you are currently holding, haste moving around the space, auto stacking abilities and more. Up until this point, I’d managed to completely stack the anime section of two shelves, but a red outline around the shelves had insinuated this was wrong. Little did I know that some of the titles have dedicated areas to stack them. I found this out via the ‘Genre Sense’ skill that highlights where they go.
Following this simple revelation that either wasn’t indicated at the beginning of VHS World ‘89 or that I overlooked, or simply just was that patient not to press the buttons willy-nilly, my enjoyment of this laborious task increased, and I was soon stalking the shop like an assassin for similar titles to complete my collections. Even with these newfound skills, the speed at which the game moves is incredibly slow, and this is by design. VHS World ‘89 is quite relaxing with its sorting features.
Set in 1989, the titles refer to classics such as Labyrinth, Ghost in the Shell, Weekend at Bernie’s, and other Oscar winners. I’m not sure whether the AI generated in the game was used to create the video covers, or even suggest the titles. I don’t mind the former, as outside of the artwork, the models and fonts are very bland, but I hope that it was humans who came up with the ideas, as they were quite amusing.
So, with a stack of tapes in my hands and plenty of time to dawdle, I managed to reallocate all 3360 VHS tapes in the store, all in their correct place. After doing so, it felt like building a Minecraft world. I beckoned my kids to have a look at what Daddy had achieved, but they were indifferent. Do they realise how many hours I spent on this!? It doesn’t matter. I enjoyed my time with it, and obviously stuck it out until the end. I would have liked a bit more fanfare though – like some confetti or even a pop-up that said, ‘Good job, now go sort out your home in real life. It’s a mess’. Alas, that didn’t happen in VHS World ‘89 – no fanfare, just you and your thoughts. Which is probably best, considering the work there was to be done.
TLDR? I liked it.
