UFO 50 review – a rangy, confounding and audacious proposition

Which is it? Which is the game you absolutely shouldn’t miss? This is precisely the wrong question, I think, but it’s taken me a long time to arrive at that decision. For my first few hours, my first few days, it felt like exactly the right question. It felt like the only question.

UFO 50 is a collection of 50 new games that look like very old games – games that have come to us, by the armful, straight from the 8-bit generation. An opening graphic shows a storage locker roller door being flung back, and someone gasping in wonder at what’s inside. 50 new games, arriving all at once. Not mini-games. Not micro-games. These are full games – games about driving and drifting and blowing planes out of the sky, games about betting on alien sporting events, and games about exploring the deepest oceans. They’re polished and internally coherent and often filled with secrets. They’re the kind of thing you’d buy individually on a NES cart in 1986 or rent from Blockbuster on a Friday night.

So the sense is, inevitably, that not all of these games are equal. In fact, there must be one truly special one in here. The first to be made perhaps, or the most lavishly detailed. There must be a polished gem, in amongst games about hitting people with beanbags, games about exploring while playing golf, and games about a hellish take on the Old West. There must be a sun around which the rest of the collection orbits like planets, like comets.

But it’s surprisingly daunting. 50 games all unlocked at the start. Games about blending in to your surroundings, games about arranging your troops, games about detonating frogs and games about shrinking and growing. Standing on the precipice of all this stuff, it feels overwhelming. 50 unplayed games all at once is a kind of tyranny. So just pick one. Clear your mind. Dive in. Go.

Maybe you approach these games in the order they’re laid out on the first screen. Maybe you go randomly. Maybe you slice and dice the way the game allows you to – big games, small games, thinky games, multiplayer games. Whatever happens, you pick one, you fire it up. A quick animation blows 8-bit dust off an 8-bit cartridge. And then? An old fashioned start screen. An old fashioned intro deck. That thick, blocky font in which so many classic NES game narratives unfolded. A handful of simple controls to remember at best. What next?

For me, what was next was that I bounced. I bounced off the first game I tried, and the second. Maybe I even bounced off the third. Then I stepped back. There’s more time, I thought to myself. I have a copy of the game early – there’s more time to get into this. That, it turns out, was the beginning of wisdom as far as UFO 50 is concerned.

Let’s go back a little. These are 50 games, all made by a fictional game developer called UFO Soft, for its fictional games machine, the LX. UFO 50 has a lot of fun with this fake history stuff. Alongside controls and genre notes and completion stats, each game comes with a fake fact about the game and the impact it made back in the day. Party House, for example, has characters based on people the developer knew. (Is this fact actually fake or is it just applied in a fake way? All part of the fun.) Onion Delivery, meanwhile, was inspired by its developer’s experiences as a courier.

All of this is entirely believable. All of this is made up. Some games will share characters, and the game will talk a bit about the chronology of the console’s main stars. This one was the first game with The Campanella in it. This one was the last. You get to see tastes change, you get to see developers squeaking just a little more out of the technology. You get to see trajectories of characters, reuse of sprites, the evolution of ideas and genres. All of this is made up too.

Then there’s the true lineage. This collection of games is made by the people behind stuff like Downwell, Catacomb Kids and, most strikingly, Spelunky. 50 games that look old but are happy to take on current game ideas and trends, to the extent that there’s even a sort of idle game in here if you look for it. The palette’s limited to 32 colours, and you’re not going to get much 3D, but nothing else is really off the table. The restrictions feel like they’re there because of cherished memories of falling in love with games in the first place, but also perhaps to push the designers a bit, hopefully in creative and unexpected ways.

And it makes me wonder a little. Spelunky, Downwell, Catacomb Kids: we’re talking about work from designers who have crafted and released classic indies. They’ve seen the indie scene change a lot over the last few years, but they’ve also dealt, I imagine, with the pressure that comes from having made something that’s obviously great and that a huge number of players have become invested in. UFO 50 is such a weird lark of a thing, a joke taken too far, a wonderfully silly idea treated with care and professionalism and brilliance and seriousness and obvious hard work, that I wonder: maybe it really is ultimately a weird lark of a thing. Maybe that’s absolutely why it exists. Maybe brilliant people have responded to the expectations that are brought to brilliant people by doing exactly what they want to do, no matter how odd it seems.

I’ve no idea if that’s true or not, but I respect it. And lo! After a bit of time spent bouncing off games and turning the collection over in my head, looking for a way in, UFO 50 started to come together for me. But it came together in its own way, and that’s interesting in and of itself. I started to appreciate bits of it. And then I started to fall in love.

There’s a really good cowboy game in here. It’s called Rail Heist. It’s the first game in the collection I truly adored, my first foothold. More than that, it’s the game that made me understand what the collection is: 50 chances to fall in love. Rail Heist was the game that made me stop searching and think: ahh! Forget everything else, I’ll stay here for a while.

Anyway: it’s a cowboy game about robbing trains. You drop in to a carriage and work your rattling way along to the target, and to do this you have to stealth around enemies and bash through walls without being seen. If you blow your cover, the whole thing switches to a turn-based affair. It’s goofy and knockabout and a quietly bizarre mix of modern and old ideas, and it feels like nothing else. It’s an absolute treat and I just love that it exists.

Another game I love is Party House. It’s an idea so simple and yet, again, I’ve never played anything quite like it. It’s almost a deck-builder. You’re having a house party and you have to invite people along to it, and ensure that the people you bring along contribute enough popularity and cash to make it worthwhile. You also need to ensure you don’t get people who are going to fight and call the cops and get the whole thing busted up, even though some of those people will have really tempting reserves of popularity and cash as well. Decisions!

There are targets to hit and you use your earnings in between rounds to add new potential house guests or expand your home for bigger parties. This game feels like it came right out of the 1980s, from the John Hughes theme down to the character models, who all look like they walked in from Maniac Mansion. (It’s also a perfect example of what UFO 50 is willing to do with the genre heading “strategy”. This is where they put the strange, luminous games that couldn’t go anywhere else. If I had one tip for this collection, it’s to look for games marked “strategy.”)

One more. And it’s a bit like Maniac Mansion, actually. Night Manor is a point-and-click adventure about trying to escape from a hideous house. You’re being stalked by a monster. You don’t know how you got trapped here in the first place. You need to collect items and combine them and use them in interesting ways, and you need to create a working map of the house in your own mind. It’s dark stuff. There’s a body floating out in the pool. There’s someone in the kitchen with their back turned to you when you enter and they just wait there and wait and wait. Heck, some of the 1980s furnishings alone are enough to create a sense of despair.

It’s a lovely, ghoulish few hours of fun. And this one gets to the heart of how a lot of UFO 50 games approach genre and the business of not simply being a pastiche. Night Manor seems to be less inspired by things like Maniac Mansion and more in conversation with it, and specifically in conversation with the memory of it. It’s about taking different paths. What if you took that idea of kids in a haunted house and just played it straight. What if you tried to evoke actual horror. What if you went for shocks and gore and a sense of lingering uneasiness depending on the ending you got?

That’s three games out of 50. Just a few of my very favourites. It’s impossible to give you the breadth of this collection, and also I increasingly think I shouldn’t. There’s stuff here which you’re meant to discover yourself. At times I’m inclined to think that UFO 50 is more than anything about the experience of encountering art. It’s about standing on the edge of it, staring into it with wonder and wariness. It’s about asking yourself whether you have the energy for it, for all of this new thought and experience in your life. If you’ve ever wondered: do I really have the vigour to become a Brian Eno fan at this stage of proceedings? How many albums is it now, and the atomic clock stuff? Yes, UFO 50 is sort of about that feeling.

I also don’t think I actually could give you the breadth of this collection anyway. That’s because my experience of it so far has been uneven – and I think that’s what the designers intended. I’ve stuck to the games that have clicked personally, and put off the stuff that hasn’t clicked until I’m in the right mood to approach it. There’s no end date for this thing. 50 games is a lot, particularly when it includes sport games and traditional RPGs and things that I don’t naturally gravitate to. Numbers matter, it turns out. If the designers had given us five games, then I think they’d have felt some pressure to ensure that they were making those five for everyone, as if such a thing is even possible. With 50 games, that’s clearly a total impossibility anyway. And that must have been so freeing!

Over time, I suspect that this will be the real lasting worth of UFO 50. When I think of games at the point when I met them when I was a kid, the word that keeps coming back is scarcity. Cost. £40 a pop for a Master System game back then. And with that £40, the fact that choices mattered, so it was rare to come across something I did not choose, rare to experience that strange form of love when you discover you click with something you hadn’t considered playing.

In many ways UFO 50 feels like a response to this problem – the way that personal tastes can limit our horizons. And it’s a similar response to the response chosen by PlayDate. Both PlayDate and UFO 50 are trying to do that gorgeous magaziney bundle of things, making sure to include things you would never personally choose along with the stuff you know from the start that you want. They’re both trying to prod you out of your own interests a little, which always feels valuable. UFO 50’s not the hot new game for a week or two, in other words. Even putting aside some of its more enigmatic and hard-to-excavate secrets, it wants to be a companion for a good chunk of your life, and it wants to unfold over time, revealing new aspects of itself as you’re ready for them. That’s an exciting ambition, if you ask me.

There’s one other thing I should mention, one other thing that makes this collection not just a dazzling piece of creative audacity and a lot of fun, but something more timely too. It’s to do with attention, and whether we have it, whether some of us have lost it, and whether we can ever hope to get it back.

There are concerned books and YouTube videos and probably PhD theses about attention these days. Faced with something like TikTok, which gives you the whole universe, randomly, and in 15-second fragments, what happens to our attention spans? Sometimes I will start scrolling through TikTok and I’ll see exactly the kind of thing I’m interested in – admittedly it will generally involve someone baking a new kind of donut – and I’ll keep moving. Love that, but no time for it. Only time for what’s next, which I also won’t have time for.

This is what I truly love about UFO 50. Rail Heist? I dropped in for five minutes just to try out something new, and I was still there an hour later, robbing trains and chucking dynamite around. And I woke up the next day thinking about Rail Heist. That’s just one example, but the same thing has happened to me a dozen times now. I’m effectively scrolling through UFO 50, and then it grabs me and pulls me inside and time passes without me knowing it.

How unexpected. And how valuable. This is what 50 games will get you, then. The surprise of it: a premise that seems to be all scrolling and endless variation and swiping for something new, is actually about the pleasures of ignoring everything except for this one glittering thing that’s in front of you right now. UFO 50’s an improbably rangy confection that’s secretly absolutely all about focus.

Review code for UFO 50 was provided by the developer.