I've been obsessing over a new game called UFO 50, which released on Steam last month.
It's quite a remarkable game. It's really grabbed me like no game has grabbed me for a long time.
The release timing was a little unfortunate, because The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom was released so soon after UFO 50 launched. I haven't been able to focus solely on either one, since I want to play them both so much. ... I've kind of been awkwardly hopping back and forth between them.
I'm getting close to the end of Zelda, though, so after I'm done, I can dedicate approximately the rest of my life to UFO 50 from then on.
So what is UFO 50 then?
It's a package of 50 entirely brand new games - retro-style games, designed to look and feel like 8-bit NES and arcade-style games, but created with modern design sensibilities.
And they're not minigames. This isn't a Rhythm Heaven situation where each "game" is actually just one level... ... Rather, UFO 50 actually has fifty entirely fully-realised, complete game experiences. Their scope is kept to NES-era standards, so there aren't any 100-hour epics or anything like that, but none of them feel like an incomplete product either. I could easily see any one of these games being sold by themselves.
The games in the collection have been given a fictional history and backstory, in order to tie them together into a bigger meta-narrative involving their development. According to the lore, this assortment of games was created by "UFO Soft", for the "LX" computer. Each game in the collection has a fictional release date, ranging from 1982 to 1989. And each game also has a fictional team of developers who worked on them, which is seen during the credits when you finish a game. Each game additionally has a cute little comment about its supposed developmental history attached to it, such as "Designed to take advantage of the LX-II, which allowed for more colors per sprite" or "The original release came with a full color hint book". I enjoy how mundanely realistic-sounding some of these snippets sound.
As you play through the games in the collection, you might start to notice that the games tend to get "better" in terms of complexity and scope as you move forward in time through the list. The first game in the collection, titled 'Barbuta', is described as being "Developed secretly on company time" by just one person, and it looks and feels like an extremely old experimental adventure game - the kind you'd maybe see on the Commodore or Spectrum. No music, black backgrounds, a slow-moving character, one-hit deaths, weirdly-drawn sprites, a non-distinct player character, non-obvious puzzle solutions... Meanwhile, the 50th game, 'Cyber Owls', is a fast-paced genre mishmash of action, shooting, stealth, beat-'em-up, all with large character sprites, marketable character designs, voice clips, and clearly higher "production values".
But this is all part of the narrative the game is trying to show us about the story of UFO Soft. It's like playing games from an alternate reality, where we get to explore this huge library of this one developer's works over the years.
In reality, however, the 50 games were designed by a team of six extremely talented indie game devs with a lot of prior game dev experience - the project lead is none other than Derek Yu, the creator of one of my favourite games of all time, Spelunky. So this game already had my attention the moment I saw it was his project, heh.
They say on the Steam store page that their goal was to design games that are "authentic but also modern". which means that, while the games look and feel like they could have come from the 1980s, they did not shy away from including features or gameplay styles that did not exist back then. They are inspired by the oldies, but not constrained by the same limitations.
The games are full of genuinely interesting ideas and twists on old genres that make them really interesting to explore. For example, There's an arcade-style platformer called Ninpek, which at first seems very faithful to the old arcade style of auto-scrolling platformers of the 1980s such as Capcom's SonSon, or SNK's Psycho Soldier, but it has a few unique twists I've never seen before - such as, when you die in Ninpek, you get to choose your respawn point by moving a little ghost around, and this ghost can even shoot the enemies so you can make sure it's safe to come back. That's a very interesting little twist!
Another game, Magic Garden, is a very unique arcade-style game that plays like a cross between Snake and Pac-Man, and it plays like an endless score-chasing arcade game where you have to rescue "oppies" (funny blobs that look a bit like puyos), and you get more points the more of them you rescue at a time (so it's a bit like Flicky too, I guess?) . However, the twist here is that... after rescuing 200 oppies, the game actually ends. It's designed like a classic endless score-chasing game, but it is in fact not endless. Which means that, in order to get a high score, you have to actually optimise your play so that you gain as many points as you can within the confines of the 200 oppie limit. You can't just rack up a score rescuing them one at a time indefinitely, you have to make your oppie trail longer and riskier in order to score big.
...This is actually quite interesting when you think about it, because... in the olden days of the arcades, it was generally expected that a player would put a coin in the machine, and that would allow them to play until they died. So arcade games weren't really allowed to "end" on their own terms, because a machine would quickly grow unpopular if the game booted the player back to the title screen without them having failed. Seeing how long a single credit can last you in a game is a big indicator of skill in the arcades, and a big incentive for players to master specific games. And so this is why even games designed as a linear series of levels would always end by looping back to the first level with your score intact, so you could keep playing until you died. Endless games tended to get harder and harder and faster and faster in order to demand more and more skill from a player who is determined to stay alive.
But UFO 50 isn't exactly beholden to the tropes of the actual arcades, now, is it? Magic Garden is an interesting example of a very arcade-style game built for a non-arcade platform. There is no need for the gameplay to speed up, so it doesn't - it stays consistent the whole way through. There is no need for the game to be endless, so it forces a limit in order to make the scoring system more interesting.
From a game design perspective, it's quite fascinating.
And Ninpek and Magic Garden are just two examples of this collection doing some very unique game design things to otherwise tried-and-true genres. ...And There's 50 of the dang things! And somehow they've all got an interesting twist to make them special in some way! It's actually insanity how much good game design sense is present in this collection.
The sheer variety of different game styles is quite remarkable as well. There's action, adventure, puzzle, platformer, puzzle-platformer, racer, arcade, run-'n'-gun, strategy, RPG, exploration, tactics, point-and-click, beat-'em-up, shmup, arena fighter, dungeon-crawler, golf, gambling, rougelike, deckbuilder, tower-defense, and even an incremental idle game of all things...??? Not to mention some of the games that I don't really have any easy label for.
As well as the large variety of genres, there's also a large variety of game lengths and game difficulties. Some games can be completely beaten in 15 minutes, while some of the bigger games can take hours and hours. One of the games, Grimstone, is literally an entire JRPG, which is the longest game that can easily take 15 or 20 hours or more.
Some games are easygoing and chill, while other games are very difficult. And they don't shy away from that classic difficulty either - that's an aspect of 1980s game design that they have fully embraced with this collection. It's really cool to see this kind of old-school difficulty done so well in a modern release.
UFO 50 encourages players to play every single game by having cute little unlockables. Each game has three "prizes" to win: a gift, a gold, and a cherry. The gift is a small item that goes in the "garden" menu, which is a little side area that sort of acts as a trophy case for all your gifts. These are awarded for completing a small task in a game, such as finding an item, exploring a certain amount, reaching halfway to the goal - basically the gifts are generally not difficult to unlock if the player is willing to engage with the game for more than a cursory glance. The gold is awarded for beating the game and seeing the ending - getting a gold turns the game's icon on the selection screen golden, and your best gold time is recorded. After attaining gold, the requirements for earning a "cherry" become visible, which usually involves going above-and-beyond just clearing the game. These can be things like earning a certain high score, completing a bonus objective, clearing every single optional level, or doing the whole game without dying. Earning a cherry turns the game icon red, and your best cherry time is recorded separately from the best gold time. Earning golds and cherries is also the way to earn the Steam Achievements for UFO 50.
It's interesting because this essentially "gamifies" the very act of playing games itself. If you've beaten 9 games and are one game clear away from that "beat 10 games" Steam Achievement, maybe that by itself is enough incentive to try out one of the ones you haven't tried yet?
It's all very compelling. ... and it's always a bit intimidating to boot up a game from a genre you're not too keen on, but if your mindset going in is, "I'll play this one until I get the gift", you might feel less pressured about it. But the gift requirements are well-designed enough that they actually do end up causing you to learn how to play. So with your newfound game knowledge, now the game feels familiar, and you can then naturally continue playing from there.
It's really fascinating because this collection has definitely made me sit down and learn how to play games from genres that I'm not usually too keen on. I'm not the biggest beat-'em-up fan in the world, but for whatever reason I was compelled to learn how to play UFO 50's "Fist Hell", which is a really rather unforgivingly difficult beat-'em-up game. I sat down, failed horribly at the game for several hours, and gave up. But something was eating away at me in the back of my mind the next day. So I looked up a youtube playthrough of the whole game, observed how they approached it, figured out the mechanics, the enemy patterns, the player's options in various circumstances, everything - and then played it again, persevering until I finally managed to earn the cherry. ...and now I am left with a bigger appreciation for beat'-em-ups than I had going in. It's quite remarkable. I can definitely see this collection introducing many new game genres to people who don't have much experience.
...Maybe a different player with a different gaming background than me will pick up UFO 50 and have an equivalent experience with Grimstone, the JRPG? It'd be so cool if this game turned more people into classic JRPG fans this way, haha.
So overall.... I'm having one heck of an amazing time with UFO 50. I've got around 130 hours of playtime on this collection overall, and so far I've managed to earn the cherry in 24 games. And some of them were pretty tough stuff. ...My eventual goal is to get cherry in all 50 games! This is gonna take me forever lol.
UFO 50 might be my number one favourite game release this year.
...but now I feel like I need to apologise to The Legend of Zelda for saying that lol.
