UFO 50 review

Do you remember spending entire weekends playing games with your friends on your family’s LX game console? Losing hours after school on Fist Hell, Cyber Owls, and Vainger? No of course you don’t, because the entire line of systems and all their games were invented for UFO 50, a game collection that wants to recapture not just a certain style of retro gaming but the feeling of playing them at home as well.

The volume of experiences on offer and their randomness is designed to replicate that nostalgic pirate NES multicart feel, the sort of thing that had a picture of Rambo fighting a dinosaur on the label and was packed with games like TURBO KOMBAT RACER 12. Poking around the menu and finding out what the heck these games are is as much a part of the experience as playing any of the fully featured 50 games themselves.

Every game comes with a (very) short description to help make that poking a little easier. There’s a tab for basic controls—more often than not as simple as X=SHOOT—and a history tab revealing an imaginary background for the game. I ended up playing something called Divers first, mostly because I had to pick something and my cursor happened to be hovering over its retro floppy disc icon at the time. I muddled through the short opening menu, a shop where I could equip my team of three lizard-like beings with elementally-aligned sticks, assuming I was in for some stiff 8-bit style RPG action. Instead I found myself swimming through dark caverns teeming with monsters, with only the on-screen depth counter for guidance.

Some passageways were blocked off, levers glimpsed on the other side. Large stone carvings could be investigated, but seemed to serve no further purpose. Aquatic battles felt intimidating and exciting. It was an incredible experience to go into completely blind, like I’d uncovered an atmospheric indie game that had been lost for over 30 years.

Well aware that there were 49 other games waiting to be played, I backed out as soon as I hit a roadblock and tried something else. This turned out to be Mini & Max—the cute icon caught my eye—which is a completely different, cartoonish adventure about a bored girl and her talking dog stuck in a single room. The pair can both shrink to a size that turns bundles of fluff into secret lands and ordinary books into giant platforms, a max-sized Mini able to use the room as an interactive level select. Walking just a couple steps completely changed the starting point for a micro-adventure that would begin wherever I made her stand before shrinking.

I had a great time with this charming platformer, but I couldn’t help wonder what other delights were waiting for me. After a bit of jumping around, through Warp Tank’s fantastic gravity defying puzzle-action and another with Pocky & Rocky-style shooting, I stumbled upon the horror adventure Night Manor: “Our only game to require a warning text,” according to its description. A few intriguing puzzles, bloodstained pieces of furniture, ominous notes, and one extremely effective hiding sequence later, and I was entranced—and eager again to try another game. If Night Manor was this good, what else was waiting for me?

My haphazard stumble through UFO 50’s library highlighted its general brilliance but its one major self-inflicted flaw, too. Night Manor, as well as the others I’ve mentioned by name above and many more besides, are more than good enough to stand on their own merits. Valbrace offers an inventive fusion of arcade-like fighting/spellcasting with traditional first-person dungeon crawling and deserves to be praised by name. Attactics is a moreish blend of straightforward combat and strategic timing that’s dangerously easy to lose hours to. Caramel Caramel brilliantly combines cutesy shmupping with point-boosting photography. 

But the buffet-like nature of 50 whole games means that by design some get lost in the mix, just one more easily skipped icon amongst many.

Because the collection throws everything at me straight away and then makes it so easy to back out, it takes serious effort to give many of these games the time or attention they clearly deserve. It’s always easier to give up when I die or encounter a knee-high obstacle and immediately bounce to play something else in here, poorly, for five brainless minutes. I have to will myself to spend time learning them, much less mastering any advanced tricks.

Making the effort often ends up souring the mood anyway, not because the games themselves aren’t good, but because it becomes clear that the enforced retro styling means so many withhold basic information that would make them much more fun to play. Some of the puzzle games in particular are much more difficult to get into—and much less enjoyable in those crucial opening minutes when a game needs to give me a clear reason to stick with it—than they would  be if I found them on the Steam store or had a physical manual to flip through. UFO 50 chooses to keep general rules, advanced tricks and subtle details secret, and the puzzlers in particular don’t make a great case for putting in the effort.

These issues can be overcome with some practice, but I have to want to practise in the first place, and then I have to want to keep practising after I’ve been abruptly kicked back to the title screen at the earliest opportunity. A few of the 50 are just a little too retro for their own good.

(Image credit: Mossmouth)

But UFO 50 is more than a bundle of imagined retro games: it’s a wonderful experience in its own right, a chance to spend another rainy afternoon sitting in front of a (fake) console playing nothing in particular. Even if it fails to make each game sing, the disjointed dipping turns every session into a pleasant ’80s-themed haze, a nonspecific wave of happy nostalgia for something that never existed. There’s almost literally something for everyone here, from cute hoppy-jumpy action to cyber pinball golf, fantasy air hockey, walrus leaping, tactical party planning, and the tennis-with-katanas action of Bushido Ball, my personal favourite sports game of 2024.

The way the collection encourages me to casually flit around its well-crafted delights virtually guaranteed I’d “discover” something new every time I played for nearly a full week. The reliable quality and raw inventiveness of it all makes me wish UFO 50’s treasures weren’t quite so well hidden.

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