UFO 50 game review — ingenious compendium of 1980s classics that never existed

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In 1982, a team of young developers founded the game studio UFO Soft. The technology they used might have been rudimentary, limited to 8-bit graphics and 32 colours, but over the next eight years they embodied the frontier spirit of gaming in its first spurt of innovation, firing off games with an ingenuity and eccentricity rarely seen today. Now, 50 of their best-loved titles have been collected together as UFO 50. It’s a fantastic package, with just one catch — UFO Soft never existed at all.

This charming experiment in retro gaming and metafiction is the brainchild of Derek Yu, the American indie developer best known for his popular platformer Spelunky. Yu hit upon the idea of a collection of short, 1980s-style arcade games that would be packaged together as a single release, and drafted in other indie developers to contribute. Around this he spun the story of UFO Soft, the fictional game studio whose development history is glancingly chronicled in the digital margins of this collection. While each game is different, an ongoing company narrative is convincingly conveyed through recurring characters, themes, and even a few sequels.

On opening, you are confronted with 50 icons, each leading to a different game. They span every genre you could imagine at a 1980s arcade, from fighter to shooter, stealth to strategy. These aren’t minigames, either — each has its own storyline and progression, beautifully packaged with a catchy chiptune soundtrack and a visual language that is a pure hit of ayahuasca-grade psychedelia.

Retro fans will immediately spot references from Streets of Rage to Bubble Bobble, Gradius, and many more. Yet almost every title features an unexpected twist that elevates it above pastiche: Caramel Caramel combines its spaceship shooting with a smart photography mechanic; Mini & Max is a charming platformer in which you can grow or shrink at will; in the ingenious adventure Mortol you have multiple lives and must die strategically, using your corpses to pave a way to the exit. With a tough base difficulty level and little in the way of guidance, each game throws you in at the deep end and leaves you to work it out — a reminder that in the days before tutorials and YouTube guides, games were arcane, mysterious things.

While the titles have a distinctive NES-era aesthetic, many of them are clearly in dialogue with the tropes and trends of contemporary gaming, such as the Metroidvania progression mechanics of submarine game Porgy or the tower defence influence in Rock On! Island, in which you hire cavemen to fend off waves of dinosaurs. There are also a few thrilling curveballs, such as Night Manor, a genuinely disturbing point-and-click horror adventure, and Party House, a winningly strange strategy game about inviting the right friends to make a great house party. If you don’t get on with a particular title, it takes only seconds to hop out and try something else.

As a complete gaming package, UFO 50 tells the story of a time of rapid technological advance, leading from the reductionist, frustratingly clunky first game Barbuta to the slick final title Cyber Owls, which features multiple genres, smooth animation and charming characters. All of them feel relatively simple by modern standards, and there is a pleasure in the sense of focus created by technical limitations and the willingness to experiment more when the stakes are low. The result is a riotous celebration of everything that early video games promised, and a reminder of a few things that we might have forgotten along the way: the joy, the invention and the sense of infinite possibilities.

★★★★☆

Out now on PC