The Last Video Store is a nostalgic Blockbuster simulator "coming soon" to PSVR
Return to the rental stores of yore
The Last Video Store is a PSVR nostalgia trip to another time in entertainment which probably won't turn into a horror game halfway through. Probably.
The developers behind Sinfeld Remastered, the Seinfeld-inspired horror game which is coming to PC and PS5 in October, revealed The Last Video Store with a debut trailer that will give a warm and fuzzy feeling to anybody who remembers sidling through aisles full of movies on tape or disc. Just having the chance to exist in that kind of space again would be appealing enough on its own, but you'll also actually be able to pick out movies and watch them in a living room or movie theater environment in the game.
The trailer for The Last Video Store highlights watching Evil Dead and Mac and Me, both cult films in their own respect (though Evil Dead is good and Mac and Me is really, really not) in an online environment with friends. Beyond that central act of renting and watching movies, RareBird Games says you'll be able to explore the area around the store or even "take a night drive around the neighborhood." Licensing whole films to be played in an indie video game sounds a bit cost prohibitive, so I'll be curious to see what approach RareBird is taking to screening these movies.
Meanwhile, if you want to replicate the full film school dropout experience, you can play Survival Mode which "includes realistic local jobs and bills to pay while managing your video enthusiast hobbies on the side." Not for a moment did I ever expect to be looking forward to working at a grocery store to make money for virtual reality DVD rentals, but life is funny like that sometimes.
Going back to Sinfeld Remastered for a minute, The Last Video Store also briefly appeared in the announcement trailer for that game back in April. Is that just some shared-universe worldbuilding? A tease of a future project which we've now seen surface on the other end? Or is The Last Video Store actually going to be a playable trailer for Sinfeld Remastered, since the latter project proudly flaunts its own P.T. inspiration? I have absolutely no idea, and frankly I am thrilled to just see where this journey leads.
Find even more thrilling worlds to explore in our guide to the best PSVR games.
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I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.