Barbie Rewind feels like the equivalent of showing your children the family heirloom rocking horse, and then watching them poke it and ask if they can play Roblox. A weird mix of nostalgia and interior decorating sim, it’s home to 17 retro Barbie games and a dreamhouse to arrange Barbie-appropriate furniture in. Now, it’s been over three decades since I last smashed a Barbie against a G.I. Joe and made smooching noises, so I called in two gaming experts, Kora (9) and Paloma (5), to assist with this review. Sadly, unlike her looks, time has not been kind to Barbie’s gaming legacy.
“That doesn’t make sense. Why does she have a scuba mask but not a toilet?” A crucial question from Kora as the girls got stuck into the only bit of Barbie Rewind they actually cared about: the decorating. This might be selling itself as a collection of Barbie games from 1991’s NES Barbie through to 2007’s Barbie as the Island Princess, but its newly created Dreamhouse mode is the big winner here. There are more than 250 pieces of furniture, and some of them are unlocked by playing the retro Barbie games. The big B and other characters like Ken and Christie give you quests, but they’re just to decorate the house, so it’s a bit like someone saying “be careful” when you’re already falling down the stairs.
The Barbie games themselves got what I would call a polite fiddle. I played all of them before the expert advisors were called in, and Rewind is heavy on minigames of the platforming and “catch the falling coconut” variety. These games haven’t been given the Monkey Island-style reboot; they’re presented seemingly entirely as is, but with a frame that relates to their various consoles to help smooth over any aspect ratio issues.
It’s great as a museum piece, but show it to anyone born after 2010 and they basically look like cave paintings. “Is that meant to be Barbie?” asks Kora incredulously, squinting at Barbie Pet Rescue. Paloma picks up the controller to play one of the minigames, a sort of cat Pong using two paws that is apparently essential to pet care, and watches the ball of yarn awkwardly bounce off the screen. She knows controllers, she plays Lego Batman, but this minigame makes no sense. The ball is slow, the angles are off, and Paloma looks at me exasperated as if I personally offended her.
Controls were an issue throughout, changing between games in a way that meant looking up the button layout for everything they wanted to try. One smart addition is the option to tweak things like your total health in certain games, which makes for a less stressful experience all round. The girls liked the concept of a lot of them – veterinarian duties, horse racing, and the fashion dress-up doll in particular – but these are kids born long after the time when you knew that what you saw on the cover of a game was light years away from how it actually looked. I could burn through pixelated bouncing and stilted dialogue on nostalgia alone, but Kora and Paloma are playing Hogwarts Legacy; they have iPad games, and their eyes know not the trauma of staring into a Gameboy Color in the back of a moving vehicle.