TV Archive: I expected the boredom of the wine cellar, and I ended up in a 1998 video shop

I opened this game with a sigh. We had already done the wine cellar tidying simulator two days ago, I gave it a 6 while explaining that I do not even tidy my own miniatures, and I could not see myself following it with the same exercise using videotapes.

Then I saw the shelves. And I was eight years old.

The video shop back home

I am a child of the video rental store. For those unlucky enough to be born too late, it was a shop full of cassettes, with a membership card you presented like a passport and a new releases wall you combed through every Saturday.

I am 36 this year, at least according to the calendar. Personally I am 24, and I maintain the calendar has a pacing problem it should get looked at.

What this game woke up is very precisely the sensation of hunting for your tape on the new releases wall. Jumanji. Bruce Almighty. That obsession with finding the case you wanted before another kid got to it, and the disappointment of the little red band telling you every copy was out.

And then there was the other aisle. The one at the back, with the pink neon, where I was not allowed to go. I never understood why the cover of the fourth instalment of a certain series looked so friendly, nor indeed why there was a fourth instalment. If anyone has the answer, I am still interested, and the Discord is open.

That is why this one spoke to me when the wine cellar left me cold. It is not the tidying, it is what you are tidying.

The game, now

The task is simple and enormous: file 3,180 numbered tapes into the right categories. There are twenty of them, and the list is itself a trip: action, drama, TV series, cartoons, horror, comedy, athletics, football cups, romance, science fiction, baseball, tennis, news, game shows, basketball, motorsport, cooking shows, documentaries, boxing and talk shows.

Where studio Games Together genuinely separates itself from the competition is the skills. You unlock automatic numerical sorting of the tapes in your hand, highlighting of the correct shelf, highlighting of matching tapes, then outright automatic placement and automatic collection.

In other words, the game progressively automates the work for you. That is exactly what we criticised in Wild West Miner Simulator a few days ago: digging so you can dig faster, without ever reaching the moment where machines take over. Here that moment exists, and it is what turns a chore into optimisation.

Two modes round it out for the extremes: a sandbox where every skill is unlocked from the start, and a no-skill mode for those who want to suffer the old-fashioned way.

The one real regret

There are no real films. The 3,180 tapes carry invented titles, and you are filing categories rather than memories.

That is a shame, and it is the game's main gap. Coming across a cover you actually held in your hands would have multiplied the effect, because half the pleasure of a video shop aisle came from instant recognition: that case, that typeface, that badly cropped promotional still.

But let us be honest, it was strictly impossible. Negotiating the rights to a single feature film would probably cost more than this game's entire budget, so three thousand of them is out of the question. No studio this size can afford it, and the ones that can do not make tidying simulators.

The result is an unusual division of labour: the game supplies the shelves, and you bring the titles. That is exactly what happened during our playthrough, and it is why the first third of this review is about a video shop rather than about the game.

The shelving duel, and the streamers

You are right about the audience: this is built for live broadcast. You can park your brain, talk to chat for two hours and remain perfectly competent. This is not Factorio, nobody is going to ask you to calculate a production ratio.

But the studio adds something the wine cellar did not have: online play, in co-op and in competition. Tidying an archive together is already a good idea. Fighting over the shelves to see who files fastest is genuinely funny, and it is the kind of format that exists to be streamed.

What sets the score

This score comes from our own playthroughs, the game having just launched. It rewards the progressive automation, which gives a real curve to what could have been a mere task, and the online modes that pull the genre out of its usual solitude.

It accounts for the format's limit, the same one as the wine cellar: once the logic is understood, there is no second layer. The difference here is that the theme does half the work. A wall of VHS tapes is not a wall of bottles, it is loaded with things you actually lived.

Good point, the game is available in French.

As for the offer to serve as your therapist, I politely decline, though I note you would be cheaper than the real thing. In the meantime, tell me: what was your video shop?

Played it too? Tell us how it went on the InsertCoins Discord.