UFO 50 is a remarkable collection of games. It’s the culmination of years worth of work from a group of some of my favorite indie developers including Derek Yu (Spelunky) and Ojiro Fumoto (Downwell, Poinpy) that I’ve been impatiently waiting for since I played a very early demo of it at PAX East in The Before Times. The in-universe background of the game/games is that it is a lost collection of games produced by UFO Soft – a long-dead development studio – and this is their unreleased retrospective collection of games they produced for their LX series of home consoles throughout the 1980s. The game opens with a cracktro, crediting the actual developers as members of the “UF0 50 Discovery Team”, and then it loads into a delightful main menu of 50 games arranged in a huge grid in chronological order of “release”. It then leaves you to your own devices to pick a disk that looks neat – blow the dust and cobwebs off – and jump into a lost game from the 80s.

Before even getting into the games, the world-building that went into this is spectacular. They didn’t just make 50 amazing retro-styled games, they came up with dev team, inter-office politics, a studio history, they designed a whole line of consoles and their features and what kind of limitations the games would have both based on the state of the industry at that time and what kinds of games would be possible on each generation of hardware. They came up with a distinct unified color palette for each console generation, and designed common fonts to use between games to give a feeling of continuity. None of this was necessary, but it’s an absurd level of attention to detail that elevates this from being an indie mini-game collection to something else entirely.

It also helps that these are far from mini-games. This collection is jam-packed with complete games. These are beefy, detailed, and most importantly complex games, and they’re also incredibly varied. Genre-wise the collection is all over the place, everything is represented, platformers, puzzle games, puzzle platformers, adventure, point & click horror, sports, fighting games, beat-em-up, shooters, RPGs, arcade games, strategy games, alien sports betting simulators, everything. Often times the games will draw comparison to an actual classic game, like Campanella feels sorta like Off-Road Racing… but with space ships… or how Fist Hell (amazing name) feels like a Double Dragon or Kunio-kun game, but they never feel like clones, they feel like just other contemporary games. And more often than not you’ll get something that is completely bizarre and new, like Lords of Diskonia or Mooncat, which again feel like they could have been contemporary releases, but also are completely insane and unlike anything of “their era” or today.

If there’s a downside to this game, it’s probably that you have to put in work to enjoy a lot of these games. None of them have a manual, many of them are obtuse at best or intentionally inscrutable at worst (looking at you Mooncat). This was absolutely intentional, because that’s just how so many games of the era were, and in some ways it contributes to the charm… but it also understandably may turn people off on some of the more advanced games. I get it, but also, these games would have had manuals (even if they were real slim on helpful content) and a collection would have included them. Even a single “How to Play” paragraph per game would have gone a long way to improve how approachable the collection is.

All that said, this collection is amazing. Nearly any of these games could have been released independently and been a strong game-of-the-year contender. Taken as a whole it’s one of the most stellar indie games ever produced, astounding in scope, size, complexity, depth and quality. If you even remotely enjoy classic console games this is one of the easiest games to Highly Recommend in recent history. Not all 50 will hit, there are definitely some games in here I respect but have zero interest in, but there are so many in here that it’s highly likely you’ll find your new favorite retro game in this collection, or maybe even several of your new favorite retro games.

As a brief aside, I have to compare this collection to the Retro Game Challenge series, aka the GameCenter CX games. These were similar faux-retrospective collections of new-but-retro-styled games released on the DS and 3DS roughly 15 years ago. Those collections were neat, but the games were far simpler and more narrow in scope. The first collection had 8 games total, in 5 genres, with 3 sequels. I think I liked the presentation of Retro Game Challenge, with the manuals and snippets of magazines to read through for secrets and tips, but at the end of the day those games feel tiny compared to a fraction of what’s on display in UFO 50.

My Top 10⌗

I’m not going to go through all 50 and provide my feelings, because a huge part of the joy to be had with UF0 50 is exploring the catalog and discovering your favorites – or better: playing a game you think sucks for long enough that you realize it actually owns – but here’s some words about the stand-out certified bangers to me, in chronological order of “release”.

Magic Garden - 1984⌗

Fantastic action puzzle game where you navigate a grid and pick up oppies and they trail behind you in a line like Snake. You then have to drop them off on special tiles to “save” them, all while avoiding “angry” oppies that roam the field, and also your own trail of oppies who haven’t been saved yet. Saving 6 of them drops a powerup on the field which lets you clear off angry oppies. The challenge comes from the fact that like Snake you can’t stop, you have to constantly run around, but it’s also way more complicated than Snake because you’re having to dodge moving targets on the field and also line up your oppies to be rescued. This game rules, I love it, as an arcade game it would have been a spectacular quarter-muncher.

Velgress - 1984⌗

It’s like Downwell but upside down. Upwell, perhaps. You start deep down the bottom of a chasm and hop and shoot your way up through a procedurally generated maze of platforms and clouds and blocks and enemies and everything. With each jump a giant wall of spikes crawls up behind you, destroying the platforms in its path, and forcing you ever upwards. It’s got some upgrades, it’s got levels, it’s got bosses in there somewhere, and it’s hectic and wonderful.

Mooncat - 1985⌗

Mooncat is like a beautiful bizarre alien artifact, or something stolen from an alternate history. It’s like something you’d find deep in a store’s no-box / no-case / probably-haunted used bin with the label half torn off. It’s a platformer that stars something that looks like a sentient carrot with legs, and it only has two inputs: left side of the controller and right side of the controller. Every direction on the dpad does “left thing” and every button on the right does “right thing”. Simply pressing one input independently moves left and right respectively. Jump – which can be charged to go higher – is to press or hold the opposite button while you’re moving. There is a shocking variety of other moves available, zero of which are explained, and there are secrets hidden seemingly everywhere. I feel I have only barely scratched the surface of what’s truly buried in this thing, and I fear prolonged exposure to its control scheme may result in irreparable brain damage.

Bushido Ball - 1985⌗

2D air-hockey, but all the characters are samurai, but also it’s actually an arcade fighting game. Amazing multiplayer game, and again, shocking level of depth and complexity. The characters all have unique special moves, charge attacks, strengths and weaknesses, and yet it’s still super well balanced.

Camouflage - 1985⌗

Top-down stealth puzzle game unlike anything I can recall ever playing. You have to move your lizard around an environment filled with predators, and have to find your baby and two collectables, and make it to the exit. Your only ability is to become the color of the type of tile you’re on to stay hidden from the predators while you run around. So hide in a desert tile to pass in front of a hungry frog, then swap to blue in a water tile so you can cross paths in front of a big alligator, etc. Impeccably designed puzzles, just the right level of challenge.

Warptank - 1985⌗

Warptank is my favorite of the several incredibly high-quality side-scrolling action/puzzle games in the collection. You have a tank. It can warp “up” in a straight line normal from whatever surface it’s on, be it the floor, wall, ceiling, etc. It can move side-to-side, but can’t jump, all you can do is warp. It’s got a hub world and something like 20 different sub-levels strewn across it, all with some unique gimmick to them. It’s also got hidden levels and secrets scattered about, which you sort of just have to trip over.

Party House - 1986⌗

Unlike a lot of UFO 50’s games, Party House represents a genre that straight up didn’t exist at the time. It’s effectively a deckbuilder, except your deck is a rolodex, and your goal is to throw a house party by inviting friends. Partygoers have different types like “old friend”, “comedian”, “rock star”, etc, and everybody has different stats that either add or subtract to your currencies of “Popularity” and “Cash”. Cash lets you buy more “house size” to fit more guests, and “Popularity” lets you add more people to your rolodex. Each “run” is a new party, where you invite people at random and when your house fills up it “scores”… unless you invite too many people considered “trouble”, and then somebody calls the cops. The goal of the various scenarios is to tech up to a special partygoer type, and then throw one party where you get all of them at once. Shockingly deep gameplay, if a little anachronistic.

Valbrace & Grimstone - 1988⌗

These are two separate and distinct games, but I’m including them here because they’re both a similar kind of insane. They put RPGs in this thing, and not like, a simple RPG, or a common trite well-tread RPG trope. Full and Complete RPGs, and they’re Good. TWO OF THEM.

Valbrace is a complete first-person maze-style dungeon crawler reminiscent of the Wizardry series, except the battle system is real-time. I haven’t gotten far in it, but it seems immense, and it’s pretty hard.

On the other side of the RPG spectrum, Grimstone is a full-on turn-based JRPG. Except it’s a western. So it’s a… “Western” JRPG.

These games each have such a scope and level of polish that makes it baffling that they’re included here and aren’t standalone games. Even just having one would be baffling, having both of them is absurd.

Pilot Quest - 1988⌗

Finally, another anachronistic one, it’s an Idle Game. It’s designed as a sequel to Planet Zoldath, featuring the UFOSoft mascot as the main character, but it’s an idle game. You’ve crash landed on Zoldath (again) and have to harvest resources on the planet (often unethically) to escape. Initially you can harvest resources yourself, but that’s slow, so you tech up to “““invite””” alien “““friends””” do your harvesting for you. Then you can use these resources to explore the WILD ZONE in what plays somewhat like an extraction shooter? You don’t have a health meter or anything, you just have a timer, but taking hits lops off 10-30 seconds. You can collect all kinds of esoteric resources in the dangerous WILD ZONE but you only keep what you escape with. If you get UFO 50, start this first, because it will generate resources while you’re playing other games, and you can come back to it between other game sessions as a palette cleanser before jumping into something else.