Which is the game you absolutely shouldn’t miss?
For my first few hours, my first few days, it felt like exactly the right question.
It felt like the only question.
50 new games, arriving all at once.
They’re polished and internally coherent and often filled with secrets.
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 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.
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.
Maybe you approach these games in the order they’re laid out on the first screen.
Maybe you go randomly.
Whatever happens, you pick one, you fire it up.
A quick animation blows 8-bit dust off an 8-bit cartridge.
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.
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.
UFO 50 has a lot of fun with this fake history stuff.
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.
This one was the first game with The Campanella in it.
This one was the last.
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.
And it makes me wonder a little.
Maybe that’s absolutely why it exists.
I’ve no idea if that’s true or not, but I respect it.
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.
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.
If you blow your cover, the whole thing switches to a turn-based affair.
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.
This is where they put the strange, luminous games that couldn’t go anywhere else.
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.
It’s dark stuff.
There’s a body floating out in the pool.
Heck, some of the 1980s furnishings alone are enough to create a sense of despair.
It’s a lovely, ghoulish few hours of fun.
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.
That’s three games out of 50.
Just a few of my very favourites.
There’s stuff here which you’re meant to discover yourself.
It’s about standing on the edge of it, staring into it with wonder and wariness.
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.
There’s no end date for this thing.
Numbers matter, it turns out.
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.
40 a pop for a Master System game back then.
And it’s a similar response to the response chosen by PlayDate.
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.
That’s an exciting ambition, if you ask me.
There are concerned books and YouTube videos and probably PhD theses about attention these days.
Love that, but no time for it.
Only time for what’s next, which I also won’t have time for.
UFO 50 accessibility options
Controls can be remapped.
This is what I truly love about UFO 50.
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.
This is what 50 games will get you, then.
UFO 50’s an improbably rangy confection that’s secretly absolutely all about focus.
Review code for UFO 50 was provided by the developer.
