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VHS World 89 is going to have a hard time when it launches in October and I say this for one glaringly obvious reason; the AI VHS covers. As someone who has fallen down the rabbit hole of addiction to these cleanup games, it was only a matter of time before I played VHS World ’89, and thanks to developer Indovers Studio I managed to get a pretty early copy to play and review here for you today.
Setting aside the disappointment of the AI art for one second, let’s talk about the gameplay itself. As with most games of this genre, VHS World puts you in the shoes of a hapless worker who comes in to work to find that everything in the store has been knocked off its shelves and tossed around. Your job is to clean up the place and put everything back on the right shelf in the right section. Don’t worry about taking too much time, you’re not paid by the hour anyway.
VHS World’s worst flaw in my opinion is also something of its greatest blessing. Having just come off of Supermarket Chaos with its ten thousand item map, the biggest problem I had with VHS World is that it is far too frontloaded. One shared feature of this genre is that the more items you correctly put back on the shelf, the more money you make for upgrades to do your job even faster. You very quickly get powers to draw in tapes from the same genre, and after that an ability that lets you automatically throw them on the shelf in the right place.
My big problem is that this game has three thousand three hundred and sixty items to stack, and you max out all of your abilities in the first third. Also the abilities start out with a ridiculously short cooldown for the genre and get even shorter from there, meaning it wasn’t long before I wasn’t even bothering to manually sort tapes because it took too long to find the shelf and by that point my cooldown had cleared up anyway. One saving balance of the automatic collection is that it only works within a certain range, so you still have to walk around the story to collect tapes up.
And let’s go back to the AI art. I am not a fan of generative AI art in games, and VHS World is a great example of using it in a way that even the general audience might not like. The big problem is that just about every tape cover in the game uses the same art style, everything has that yellow piss filter and some of the covers are virtually identical except for one or two changes. To use another example, Retro Rewind has a library of spoof movie titles, and its assets are hand-made and look all the better because of it.
Should you play VHS World 89? I didn’t hate it, it’s definitely on the lower end of the cleanup games I have played so far. And I say this knowing many of you are going to immediately say no the moment you hear it has AI textures. Check it out this October and like and subscribe for more videos.
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