Rewind or Die
released on Apr 14, 2023
There's a serial killer stalking your video store, and you just got called into work on your day off! Stock shelves, deal with customers and run for your life!
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This review contains spoilers
Rewind or Die is a minimum wage job simulator and retro indie horror game developed by Comp-3 Interactive and published under Puppet Combo’s Torture Star Video label. I’m personally unsure of how the development went but the main developer is Mike Lythgoe, a UK man who had previously voiced the Booty Creek Cheek Freak according to the Puppet Combo wiki. During the development a friend, Anthony Rodden, had died and was given a memoriam section at the end of the game while his father has a cameo on a wanted poster in the game. The dude was even enough of a family man to digitally add his dog, Zakk, into the game as a cameo as well. My personal experience with the game came about because I’m a huge fan of the indie Puppet Combo horror genre, and had learned about this title through both Twitter posts as well as Patreon teasers. While I had given my original key to a buddy to play and potentially cover on his channel, I had plans to pick it up around Christmas time due to the fact my one friend who I stream games for every saturday wanted me to give it a shot. Luckily another buddy of mine, Casey, got me this game and The Outlast Trials for the holidays so I didn’t have to buy it (shoutout to Casey, you f u c kin’ knob!). I recently just sat down and finished it in one session, here’s how I felt about it.
Tony Brown, an employee at Video2Go (a video rental store in 1997 Northern England) is at his apartment with his roommate Franky when he’s called into work by his boss, Keith, to cover for another co-worker’s shift and help until 9 PM. Begrudgingly he goes in and walks through alleyways to his job nearby while also running into Zakk the Dog and dealing with an aggressive homeless man. Making his way in, he deals with customers before being questioned by a reporter named Timothy on a number of disappearances relating to the store. He disappears after being kidnapped by a mysterious killer in a pig mask, while Tony and a co-worker he found sleeping on the toilet close up shop. Later on, Tony is forced to close up shop himself and is asked with cleaning up (running into The Captain, a homeless war vet who sleeps out back near the dumpsters) and closing shop when a police detective named Harry Johnson questions him about information relating to the disappearances. Tony finds the records of people who had an account and gives them to him before cleaning up shop again only for this pig masked killer to taunt and throw a cinderblock into the store. Tony is then forced to call up his manager Keith (a total pr i c k by the way) who tells him to board up the windows. However things only escalate when screams are heard out back, and Tony is forced to crawl through the vents and is chased out into the alley ways only to get knocked out.
Waking up in a slaughterhouse, Tony wakes up the next day in a cell located in a slaughterhouse next to the reporter from earlier. Sneaking out via a hole in the cupboard, he proceeds to tinker around to try to find his way out only to find skeletal remains, copious amounts of blood and a flayed corpse slung up crucifixion style. He also encounters Captain locked in an incinerator, whom he promises he will rescue as well as Zakk the dog in a small cell upstairs. From here it’s mostly a tale of life or death, with a freezer trap leading to Tony falling into the sewers as Slaw gives chase. Flipping a bunch of switches that’ll open up the entrance back to the street level (and encountering the corpse of a sewer worker watching p o r n), he evades Slaw and manages to make it back to the slaughterhouse. Sneaking through a vent, he runs into a dismembered security guard, who tells him to find the key to the room that has his gun. This key is in the incinerator room, and if done correctly you’ll be able to save Captain from a perilous death by reading instructions while also picking up the key. Grabbing the gun from a locker, Tony also gets a code to a loft upstairs where he finally faces down Slaw for a battle and ends up riddling him with bullets. To get the gold ending, you’ll need to find 5 pig plushies around the map and shoot them before opening up a door and fighting a demonic pig plushie entity, who will reward you with the bolt cutters. Tony gets all of that as well as an ID to unlock the gates to the outside when Slaw attempts to kill you one last time, only to get impaled with a crowbar and thrown out. If you use the bolt cutters on Zakk’s cage, you’ll get the best ending where Tony, Captain and Zakk leave the slaughterhouse alive. It then cuts to the last night, where it shows Keith being interrogated by the detectives. Keith denies knowing what happens, but is revealed to be Slaw after a pig mask flashes in and out before it cuts to credits.
My thoughts on the plot were that it wasn’t bad, it was a standard slasher affair that got a big goofy towards the end with certain things. My two main points (kinda) that got a bit goofy was the boss battle against the plush pig monster thing which was a bit of a jarring tone shift, especially with an Army of Darkness reference thrown in there. The other one was the reveal of Keith, which wasn’t hinted at all unless you get the high score in a Flappy Bird clone, which opens up and reveals a hidden newspaper shrine to the killer’s antics (which includes a dude holding a smartphone in 1997, funny stuff). However, I guess I kinda wish I knew more about Keith other than he just likes killing people. Why does he like it? What’s the obsession with meat? Other than that, it’s a fun time! Who knows, Puppet Combo releases novel tie-ins, I’d like to see one of these one day that expands upon it.
The gameplay is a first person narrative perspective and for the most part mostly linear until you get kidnapped and brought to the slaughterhouse. Before that you can examine your environment, interact with certain objects and even play a Flappy Bird clone. Otherwise you spend your time picking up objects and interacting with puzzles, and the gameplay doesn’t escalate until Chapter 4 of 5. Once you get into the sewers however, it turns into a run and hide game, where the main goal is to flip five switches located around the sewers area while outrunning and avoiding Slaw in every corner. My main feelings on this chase sequence was that it was a bit tense at first before it slowly became kinda tedious, and I feel that it’s mainly due to the linear nature of these segments as one wrong corner turn and two stabs in a row and your dead and sent to the last checkpoint.
For example the warehouse, there isn’t much you can do other than hide and peek around certain corners in the layout and wait until Slaw walks past it before walking and/or running past it as soon as you get a far distance away. Oftentimes I wasn’t really bothered by it other than the mostly linear way of getting from Point A to Point B, though sometimes I found how Slaw tends to hover around your locations reminds me a bit of the Outlast games. Oftentimes I would go to a certain location to find a specific item or to complete an objective and the guy seems to hover around any area you specifically go in even if you weren’t seen in that area instead of doing a patrol around a base area and making it feel more natural. I guess I can’t complain much really, I could honestly be wrong and the tension was still there, It's just more of a personal thing to me. Chapter 5 is more of Chapter 3, where you find certain objects to complete puzzles but you also get a gun (which was banned in the same year that the game takes place in, 1997, funny enough) where you can engage in a showdown with the killer which was fun along with a secret boss that reminded me of a retro shooter which was a total tonal shift of confusion but besides the point. Gameplay to me despite the criticism towards Chapter 4 a bit was good stuff, though the only other criticism to me was that sometimes after I beat a chapter or did an objective the game would freeze for a couple of seconds but other than that it was solid.
The graphics as always with these types of retro-styled indie games are fantastic, I love it all to death. The models are chunky, the walking animations are sometimes hilarious and the texture wrapping which moves while you move is beautiful as hell. I think my main issue with graphics is something that you can turn off at any point: the VHS filter. I LOVE grainy footage filters, though sometimes I feel like it goes too far to the point where it hurts my eyes so I mainly stuck with turning off the filter. I would’ve loved to have seen different kinds of filters, perhaps less intensive ones or maybe a slider of sorts. The character models are cool and have facemaps of real life people, though the most unique model to me is Zakk the dog, probably because it’s the smoothest map in the game. Also Slaw but that’s because he’s a dude in a pig mask and I assume white boxers and looks freaky as hell so bonus points.
So how’s the sound design? Well the voice acting is pretty good! Tony’s voice does an accurate portrayal as someone who's tired of the shit (both serial killer and deadbeat job wise) and just wants everything to be done with. Slaw’s voice is pretty freaky too with a lower pitch to it, though I personally wished it would’ve went a tad bit lower to sound more ominous though that’s probably unrealistic and I doubt that a psychopath in white boxers is going to be carrying around a voice modulator so it is what it is. Youtube Letsplayer Mrkravin voices Keith, the american VHS store owner in a 1997 Northern England (funny as hell to me) and while kind of jarring having a complete accent switch I wasn’t really bothered by it. The actual mixing for the most part is fine too, though I wish to god that the radios and the one TV would have some subtitles or a bit higher mixing so I could understand what they were saying though. The main music piece that struck me was the music that played during the cold intro on the conveyor belt, which I thought was hilarious and set the tone for this grungy and somewhat cheesy 80s styled grindhouse horror film. Lastly the environmental sound design is pretty on point too, no real complaints in that department either. Everything fit neatly into place and that’s all I can really ask for in a game.
Rewind or Die is another example of a small and fun seminal indie retro horror experience, something you can pick up and have a bit of fun and a scare for around the two hours or so that you have the title. I’m always going to be weak for this genre and as such I liked this title a lot, despite the somewhat goofiness of unlocking the best ending and the reveal of the killer’s identity kind of confusing me along with some other minor complaints. I would definitely recommend picking this up when you can if you’re looking for a short experience, whether or not you want to spend 12 Dollars U.S. is up to you of course, I probably would have just to support the indie devs but it’s valid if you feel like 12 dollars for 2 hours is a bit much. After the release of the game in April, I haven’t heard of much from the developer other than the potential for a sci-fi horror game which I’m hoping to see in the future along with a game titled End of the Line (link below) which I just wishlisted. Whatever he’s got going on, I’m interested in seeing more as I enjoyed my brief time with Slaw in his slaughterhouse torture dungeon.
Links:
https://twitter.com/comp3int
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2962689218
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1879810/End_of_the_Line/
https://puppetcombo.fandom.com/wiki/Rewind_Or_Die
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I6GT8KSYEA&ab_channel=GamerSault
From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/
Tony Brown, an employee at Video2Go (a video rental store in 1997 Northern England) is at his apartment with his roommate Franky when he’s called into work by his boss, Keith, to cover for another co-worker’s shift and help until 9 PM. Begrudgingly he goes in and walks through alleyways to his job nearby while also running into Zakk the Dog and dealing with an aggressive homeless man. Making his way in, he deals with customers before being questioned by a reporter named Timothy on a number of disappearances relating to the store. He disappears after being kidnapped by a mysterious killer in a pig mask, while Tony and a co-worker he found sleeping on the toilet close up shop. Later on, Tony is forced to close up shop himself and is asked with cleaning up (running into The Captain, a homeless war vet who sleeps out back near the dumpsters) and closing shop when a police detective named Harry Johnson questions him about information relating to the disappearances. Tony finds the records of people who had an account and gives them to him before cleaning up shop again only for this pig masked killer to taunt and throw a cinderblock into the store. Tony is then forced to call up his manager Keith (a total pr i c k by the way) who tells him to board up the windows. However things only escalate when screams are heard out back, and Tony is forced to crawl through the vents and is chased out into the alley ways only to get knocked out.
Waking up in a slaughterhouse, Tony wakes up the next day in a cell located in a slaughterhouse next to the reporter from earlier. Sneaking out via a hole in the cupboard, he proceeds to tinker around to try to find his way out only to find skeletal remains, copious amounts of blood and a flayed corpse slung up crucifixion style. He also encounters Captain locked in an incinerator, whom he promises he will rescue as well as Zakk the dog in a small cell upstairs. From here it’s mostly a tale of life or death, with a freezer trap leading to Tony falling into the sewers as Slaw gives chase. Flipping a bunch of switches that’ll open up the entrance back to the street level (and encountering the corpse of a sewer worker watching p o r n), he evades Slaw and manages to make it back to the slaughterhouse. Sneaking through a vent, he runs into a dismembered security guard, who tells him to find the key to the room that has his gun. This key is in the incinerator room, and if done correctly you’ll be able to save Captain from a perilous death by reading instructions while also picking up the key. Grabbing the gun from a locker, Tony also gets a code to a loft upstairs where he finally faces down Slaw for a battle and ends up riddling him with bullets. To get the gold ending, you’ll need to find 5 pig plushies around the map and shoot them before opening up a door and fighting a demonic pig plushie entity, who will reward you with the bolt cutters. Tony gets all of that as well as an ID to unlock the gates to the outside when Slaw attempts to kill you one last time, only to get impaled with a crowbar and thrown out. If you use the bolt cutters on Zakk’s cage, you’ll get the best ending where Tony, Captain and Zakk leave the slaughterhouse alive. It then cuts to the last night, where it shows Keith being interrogated by the detectives. Keith denies knowing what happens, but is revealed to be Slaw after a pig mask flashes in and out before it cuts to credits.
My thoughts on the plot were that it wasn’t bad, it was a standard slasher affair that got a big goofy towards the end with certain things. My two main points (kinda) that got a bit goofy was the boss battle against the plush pig monster thing which was a bit of a jarring tone shift, especially with an Army of Darkness reference thrown in there. The other one was the reveal of Keith, which wasn’t hinted at all unless you get the high score in a Flappy Bird clone, which opens up and reveals a hidden newspaper shrine to the killer’s antics (which includes a dude holding a smartphone in 1997, funny stuff). However, I guess I kinda wish I knew more about Keith other than he just likes killing people. Why does he like it? What’s the obsession with meat? Other than that, it’s a fun time! Who knows, Puppet Combo releases novel tie-ins, I’d like to see one of these one day that expands upon it.
The gameplay is a first person narrative perspective and for the most part mostly linear until you get kidnapped and brought to the slaughterhouse. Before that you can examine your environment, interact with certain objects and even play a Flappy Bird clone. Otherwise you spend your time picking up objects and interacting with puzzles, and the gameplay doesn’t escalate until Chapter 4 of 5. Once you get into the sewers however, it turns into a run and hide game, where the main goal is to flip five switches located around the sewers area while outrunning and avoiding Slaw in every corner. My main feelings on this chase sequence was that it was a bit tense at first before it slowly became kinda tedious, and I feel that it’s mainly due to the linear nature of these segments as one wrong corner turn and two stabs in a row and your dead and sent to the last checkpoint.
For example the warehouse, there isn’t much you can do other than hide and peek around certain corners in the layout and wait until Slaw walks past it before walking and/or running past it as soon as you get a far distance away. Oftentimes I wasn’t really bothered by it other than the mostly linear way of getting from Point A to Point B, though sometimes I found how Slaw tends to hover around your locations reminds me a bit of the Outlast games. Oftentimes I would go to a certain location to find a specific item or to complete an objective and the guy seems to hover around any area you specifically go in even if you weren’t seen in that area instead of doing a patrol around a base area and making it feel more natural. I guess I can’t complain much really, I could honestly be wrong and the tension was still there, It's just more of a personal thing to me. Chapter 5 is more of Chapter 3, where you find certain objects to complete puzzles but you also get a gun (which was banned in the same year that the game takes place in, 1997, funny enough) where you can engage in a showdown with the killer which was fun along with a secret boss that reminded me of a retro shooter which was a total tonal shift of confusion but besides the point. Gameplay to me despite the criticism towards Chapter 4 a bit was good stuff, though the only other criticism to me was that sometimes after I beat a chapter or did an objective the game would freeze for a couple of seconds but other than that it was solid.
The graphics as always with these types of retro-styled indie games are fantastic, I love it all to death. The models are chunky, the walking animations are sometimes hilarious and the texture wrapping which moves while you move is beautiful as hell. I think my main issue with graphics is something that you can turn off at any point: the VHS filter. I LOVE grainy footage filters, though sometimes I feel like it goes too far to the point where it hurts my eyes so I mainly stuck with turning off the filter. I would’ve loved to have seen different kinds of filters, perhaps less intensive ones or maybe a slider of sorts. The character models are cool and have facemaps of real life people, though the most unique model to me is Zakk the dog, probably because it’s the smoothest map in the game. Also Slaw but that’s because he’s a dude in a pig mask and I assume white boxers and looks freaky as hell so bonus points.
So how’s the sound design? Well the voice acting is pretty good! Tony’s voice does an accurate portrayal as someone who's tired of the shit (both serial killer and deadbeat job wise) and just wants everything to be done with. Slaw’s voice is pretty freaky too with a lower pitch to it, though I personally wished it would’ve went a tad bit lower to sound more ominous though that’s probably unrealistic and I doubt that a psychopath in white boxers is going to be carrying around a voice modulator so it is what it is. Youtube Letsplayer Mrkravin voices Keith, the american VHS store owner in a 1997 Northern England (funny as hell to me) and while kind of jarring having a complete accent switch I wasn’t really bothered by it. The actual mixing for the most part is fine too, though I wish to god that the radios and the one TV would have some subtitles or a bit higher mixing so I could understand what they were saying though. The main music piece that struck me was the music that played during the cold intro on the conveyor belt, which I thought was hilarious and set the tone for this grungy and somewhat cheesy 80s styled grindhouse horror film. Lastly the environmental sound design is pretty on point too, no real complaints in that department either. Everything fit neatly into place and that’s all I can really ask for in a game.
Rewind or Die is another example of a small and fun seminal indie retro horror experience, something you can pick up and have a bit of fun and a scare for around the two hours or so that you have the title. I’m always going to be weak for this genre and as such I liked this title a lot, despite the somewhat goofiness of unlocking the best ending and the reveal of the killer’s identity kind of confusing me along with some other minor complaints. I would definitely recommend picking this up when you can if you’re looking for a short experience, whether or not you want to spend 12 Dollars U.S. is up to you of course, I probably would have just to support the indie devs but it’s valid if you feel like 12 dollars for 2 hours is a bit much. After the release of the game in April, I haven’t heard of much from the developer other than the potential for a sci-fi horror game which I’m hoping to see in the future along with a game titled End of the Line (link below) which I just wishlisted. Whatever he’s got going on, I’m interested in seeing more as I enjoyed my brief time with Slaw in his slaughterhouse torture dungeon.
Links:
https://twitter.com/comp3int
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2962689218
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1879810/End_of_the_Line/
https://puppetcombo.fandom.com/wiki/Rewind_Or_Die
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I6GT8KSYEA&ab_channel=GamerSault
From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/
Funny lil horror game
The quality of this reminds me of the quality of a random B movie you'd get from the VHS horror section. A fun time: some camp, some nonsense, some genuinely disturbing sections, some jump scares, and a homemade-level production value. The sub-3 hour game is a beautiful thing.
The gameplay here is mostly solving baby-ish puzzles but the allure is the mood and the tone of the aesthetics which work quite well.
What I really learned from this game though is that I need to develop a true video store simulation game. There is a half-baked mechanic where you return tapes to the shelves and I had too much fun doing it.
The gameplay here is mostly solving baby-ish puzzles but the allure is the mood and the tone of the aesthetics which work quite well.
What I really learned from this game though is that I need to develop a true video store simulation game. There is a half-baked mechanic where you return tapes to the shelves and I had too much fun doing it.
A short yet enjoyable experience. The puzzles and gameplay were clean and well polished, and there weren't any parts of the game that stood out as particularly underdeveloped or lacking, every section of the game worked, and worked well.
Whilst a horror game, I can't say it 'got to me' on a fear level - The horror more so came through occassional jumpscares, which although cheap didn't overstay their welcome. The 'survival horror' aspect of it - the section in the sewer where Slaw was searching for the player, began as a tense experience, and built up to be the true 'horror' the game was lacking up until now. This went out of the window as soon as Slaw spotted me for the first time, as the music - whilst cool, didn't exactly fit the tone, and only really released the tension. From here, any repeat chase was simply a case of 'oh he's here again'. But the song was really cool, and it did hype me up, so I'm okay with it.
Whilst a horror game, I can't say it 'got to me' on a fear level - The horror more so came through occassional jumpscares, which although cheap didn't overstay their welcome. The 'survival horror' aspect of it - the section in the sewer where Slaw was searching for the player, began as a tense experience, and built up to be the true 'horror' the game was lacking up until now. This went out of the window as soon as Slaw spotted me for the first time, as the music - whilst cool, didn't exactly fit the tone, and only really released the tension. From here, any repeat chase was simply a case of 'oh he's here again'. But the song was really cool, and it did hype me up, so I'm okay with it.
Jogo curto mas é muito legal, segue a formula da puppet combo mas ainda é divertido, recomendo.
Really short but the jumpscares got me everytime lmao.