VHS-Scrapper

A small salvage robot is left alone on a rusted-out junk planet. The only thing it has for company is a 4-track VHS deck built into its chest.

Junk is heavy. A fridge takes two of you, a satellite dish three, and some things take everything you've got. So you record yourself. Keep a take, the tape rewinds, and your past self plays back beside you, pushing exactly where you pushed before.

But this is tape, and tape wears out. Every rewind copies your old takes one more time, and each copy is a little worse than the last.

Generation loss

Every copy loses something, always by the same rules, so you can plan around it:

Copy	What it's lost
GEN1	Nothing. A perfect copy of you.
GEN2	Plays back 0.2 s late.
GEN3	Plays back 0.4 s late.
GEN4	0.6 s late, and pushes at half strength.
GEN5+	Also drops out for a moment every two seconds, like a worn tape losing tracking.

You can see the age of a copy at a glance. Older copies fade from your color to grey, jitter, split into red and blue, and flicker. The tape only holds four tracks, so sooner or later you'll have to record over one of your past selves.

What's on the tape

• 16 story tapes: cans, fridges, dishes, and finally someone you'll want to bring home.
• 14 challenge tapes for when the story isn't hard enough. Clear them to unlock paint jobs and hats for your robot (your copies wear them too).
• Random VHS: pull a randomly built tape from the scrap pile. Like one? Put it on your shelf. Don't? Scrap it and pull another. Some of them are duds. That's what scrap is for.
• Three stars per tape: one for clearing it, one for beating the par time, one for doing it without wasted takes.
• Things to work with: pressure plates and colored doors, laser curtains, conveyor belts, rivers and bridges, teleporters, and cassettes that add tracks to your tape.

Controls

	Keyboard	Touch
Drive	WASD / arrow keys	Drag anywhere
Keep the take and rewind	R	KEEP
Retake (rewind without keeping)	X	RETAKE
Fast-forward	Hold F	Hold FF
Eject the tape (start over)	E	EJECT
Back	Esc	MENU / BACK
Fullscreen	F11	—

Recording starts the moment you move, so take a second to plan first.

Tips

• Put your oldest copies on pressure plates. Plates don't care how strong you are.
• Hold F to fast-forward while you wait for your copies to catch up. The take still records.
• If a copy keeps arriving a little late, start your next take a little earlier.

Credits

• Design and direction: D4egon
• Title art: Grok
• Code: written with help from Claude (Anthropic)
• Sound: VCR sounds from Pixabay by freesound_community, u_3so8jrhg71, u_8e8ungop1x and moniker_subriquet. Tape hiss and motor hum are generated in-game.
• Made with Godot 4.7.