UFO 50 Review

Do you remember spending entire weekends playing with friends on your family’s LX console? How you wasted hours after school on Fist Hell, Cyber ​​​​Owls and Vainger? Of course not, because an entire line of systems and all their games were invented for UFO 50, a collection of games that wants to recreate not only a certain style of retro gaming, but also the feeling of playing them at home.

The amount of experiences on offer and their randomness are designed to recreate the nostalgic feel of a multi-cartridge pirate NES console, the kind with a picture of Rambo fighting a dinosaur on the label and filled with games like TURBO KOMBAT RACER 12. Browsing through the menus and figuring out what the hell these games are is as much a part of the experience as playing any of the 50 fully featured games.

Each game has a (very) brief description to lend a hand with this stabbing. There’s a tab with basic controls—most often as basic as X=SHOOT—and a story tab that reveals the game’s imaginary background. I ended up playing something called Divers first, mostly because I had to choose something and my cursor happened to be hovering over a retro floppy disk icon. I made my way through the brief opening menu, the shop where I could equip my party of three lizard-like creatures with elemental-style sticks, assuming I was in for some stiff 8-bit RPG action. Instead, I found myself in dim caves full of monsters, with only an on-screen depth counter to guide me.

Some passages were blocked, with levers apparent on the other side. There were gigantic stone sculptures to examine, but they seemed to serve no purpose. The water battles felt terrifying and thrilling. It was an incredible experience to go into it completely blind, like I had discovered an atmospheric indie game that had been lost for over 30 years.

Knowing full well that there were 49 other games waiting for me, I backed out as soon as I hit a snag and tried something else. It turned out to be Mini & Max — the cute icon caught my eye — a completely different, cartoonish adventure about a bored girl and her talking dog trapped in a room.

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Both can shrink to a size that turns bundles of fluff into secret lands and regular books into giant platforms, and the max-sized Mini can utilize a room as an interactive level selector. Walking just a few steps completely changed the starting point for a micro adventure that would have started where I had left it before it shrunk.

I had a great time with this cute platformer, but I couldn’t lend a hand but wonder what other delights awaited me. After a while of jumping around, through the fantastic gravity-defying action game Warp Tank, and another of Pocky and Rocky-shooting style, I stumbled upon the horror adventure Night Manor: “Our only game that requires a warning text,” as its description says. A few intriguing puzzles, bloody furniture, sinister notes, and one incredibly effective stealth sequence later, and I was hooked — and eager to try another game again. If Night Manor was this good, what else was waiting for me?

My casual search of UFO 50’s library has highlighted its overall brilliance, but also one major flaw I’ve brought upon myself. Night Manor, as well as the others I’ve mentioned by name above and many more, are more than good enough to stand on their own terms. Valbrace offers an inventive blend of arcade-style combat/spellcasting with classic first-person dungeon crawling and deserves the praise on its own merits. Attactics is a seductive mix of straightforward combat and strategic timing that’s dangerously uncomplicated to waste hours on. Caramel Caramel brilliantly combines sweet shooting with point-boosting photography.

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However, the smorgasbord-like nature of the 50 games causes some of them to get lost in the crowd, becoming just another easily missed icon among many others.

Because the collection throws everything at me at once, and then it’s so uncomplicated to back out, it takes a earnest 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 jump back to play something else, poorly, for five mindless minutes. I have to force myself to put in the time to learn them, let alone master the advanced tricks.

Putting in the effort often ends up ruining the mood, not because the games themselves aren’t good, but because it becomes clear that the forced retro feel means that so many people are hiding necessary information that would make them so much more enjoyable to play. Some of the puzzle games in particular are much harder to get into — and much less enjoyable in those crucial early minutes when the game needs to give me a clear reason to stick with it — than if I had found them on the Steam store or had a physical manual to look through. UFO 50 chooses to keep the general rules, advanced tricks, and subtle details a secret, and the puzzles in particular aren’t a good argument for putting in the effort.

These issues can be overcome with a little practice, but first I have to be willing to practice, and then I have to be willing to keep practicing when I’m suddenly thrown back to the title screen at the first opportunity. A few of the 50 are just too retro for their own good.

But UFO 50 is more than just a collection of imagined retro games: it’s a great experience in its own right, a chance to spend another rainy afternoon in front of your (fraudulent) console without playing anything in particular. Even if it can’t make every game sing, the inconsistent immersion turns every session into a pleasant ’80s haze, a nonspecific wave of ecstatic nostalgia for something that never existed. There’s literally something for everyone here, from cute, bouncy action to cyberpinball golf, fantasy air hockey, jumping walruses, tactical party planning, and katana-wielding tennis action in Bushido Ball, my favorite sports game of 2024.

The way the collection encourages me to freely jump between its carefully crafted delights practically guaranteed that I would “discover” something up-to-date every time I played for almost a full week. The reliable quality and raw ingenuity make me wish that UFO 50’s treasures were not as well hidden.