Has anyone reading this even seen a VHS tape before? How about video clubs? Anyone remember those? Back in the long, long ago there was a thing called video clubs, where you could rent movies. Think of it like a library, but with only movies and you paid to borrow them because the internet sucked back then. A Redbox but in the shape of a store, essentially. Before movies came on disks, they came in these cassettes called VHS (Video Home System), which required a VCR to play. That is the apparatus that old, bad comedians are always claim not to be able to set the clocks on. VHS was alright. The image and sounds were of an inferior quality, but they were a lot harder to damage than DVD’s. Replay-VHS is not Dead is an ode of sorts to the old format, and to the movies that were popular during the time in the form of a side-scroller puzzle platformer with a rewind mechanic that is simultaneously what separates it from the pack and also keeps it from being truly great.
Replay puts you in the shoes of Harvey, a delivery boy and member of a retro video club, who is struck by lightning as he walks home with his current selection of movies. After the lightning strike he finds that when he puts the movies in the VCR, he is absorbed into them. This terrifies Harvey, as he fears he won’t be able to escape the movies to return them on time and Blue, the mean video club employee, will cancel his membership. But not all is lost! Harvey is blessed with the gift of a controller that lets him rewind time. He must now journey through his four movies to escape and keep his valuable video club membership.
Replay is a side scrolling puzzle platformer. The game will drop you into a hub in the movie you are playing at the time, and then you go into each level. This level is framed as a reenactment of a scene from the movie. You will control multiple characters, and the objective of each level is to collect a key, and make sure everyone makes it to their designated exit points. You control one character at the time but all of them acting in unison are required in order to beat the level. So when you rewind, you go back to the start of the level and you can choose a new character. The character you previously played as will perform the same exact moves you gave them previously. The key of the game is to play each character over and over until you can synchronize their moves in a way that allows them to finish the level. It’s similar in a sense to Holywood directors performing different takes of a scene until they get the result they want. The game remembers your inputs and replays them with the exact timing you had when you played as the character itself. This means any thing that is out of place will knock the character out of that routine. Smart players will figure out ways to use this to their advantage.
The rewind mechanic really sets the game apart, and initially when you make everything come together it feels great. This is, however, due to the fact that the first few levels are fairly simple and you won’t have to rewind too many times to clear them. As the game progresses and the levels become more complex, they will take more steps to complete. The problem is that when you rewind you can’t go back to specific point in the level, you always go back to the beginning, and when a level takes four or five steps for three characters each, replaying the same sections, making the same moves over and over makes the experience tedious. The levels aren’t really harder, they just take longer to clear but many times I felt like I needed to stop after clearing a level. The repetition really hurts the game, and it’s a shame, because it’d be easy to fix. All that is needed is to give the player the option to just rewind to a specific point in the level. This way when you have to pause to get a character to do one more thing, you wouldn’t have to restart the whole level again and repeat all of the actions that took you to that point.
The game does give you plenty of varied environments to play in by having four different movies to parody. VHS Is Not Dead really takes advantage of the movie set up to give you different mechanics and puzzles. The humor depends a bit too much from nostalgia for my personal linking, but anyone who has seen the movies that the levels and characters are inspired by is bound to at least be amused by it.
There is nothing to fear but losing your subscription.
Replay is an ode to the type of movies one would rent during the VHS days, and there is clearly a lot of love for the subject matter in the game. Replay – VHS Is Not Dead has charm, and in an industry that is filled with quirky side scrolling platformers, I found that its idea of essentially putting the player in the director’s chair each level to be novel enough to make it stand out. Unfortunately, the mechanic that makes it unique is also what ultimately drags the game down. The constant repetition got to be too much for me in later levels, and I would often find that I needed a break after each level. Nevertheless, if you don’t feel like you would mind how repetitive the rewind mechanic is, or if you are a movie enthusiast that enjoys pop culture references, go ahead and pick it up.
