UFO 50 review: Old games are still good games

I love diving into gaming history, playing old games and keeping those experiences in my mind for when I play new ones. There’s a whole new world of insight you can access when you come into something armed with context of what came before. Even in my short time at Shacknews I’ve pushed things like preservation because capturing, holding onto, and sharing knowledge feels like an important and underserved piece of criticism in games. UFO 50, a collection of retro-styled games from Mossmouth, feels as much like validation for those principles as it does a new, original work. It’s a fictional portfolio from a long-lost video game studio that celebrates not just games themselves, but the value of going back and unearthing art from the past to both enjoy it and learn from it.

Real games, fictional context

UFO 50 doesn’t narrate its story to you, but there’s still a compelling framing device that bleeds into the game’s nuts and bolts. You’re playing a set of 50 games developed by UFO Soft, a company that developed and published games on its series of LX consoles. The games were made throughout the 1980s, and you literally wipe the dust off each cartridge when you play them for the first time. In the main menu each title has a little synopsis, as well as a sentence or two adding some kind of additional historical context. Perhaps it’s an anecdote about a game’s inspiration, such as from a poster in the studio’s bathroom. Other times you’ll get something like how Night Manor, a point and click-style horror game, was UFO Soft’s only game featuring required warning text.

Despite only being a few paragraphs of text in total, there’s a real sense of UFO Soft being a real company that existed in UFO 50’s imagined world. You can feel the vibe that this was a small group in an era when games could be pumped out based on singular ideas, then iterated on in further sequels and other new projects, enough to sustain a company and build not just a library, but an identity. Each little snippet of context feels like reading through old gaming magazines and building a picture in your mind of what it may have looked like to work in gaming in the 1980s.

A complex collection

It’s hard to tell if it’s deliberate or not, considering how in interviews the folks behind this game didn’t initially view this project as a single package. But the ways in which the games in UFO 50 follow a sort of evolutionary path is fascinating. If you play each game in order you can map out the trajectory in your mind, especially when you come across sequels and spinoffs of what seem to be UFO Soft’s core IPs. It’s actually wild to think about how the real-life developers plotted out the fictional devs’ progress and laid it out across these titles, rather than simply making each individual game as “complete” with all the lessons we’ve collectively learned as devs and gamers in 2024. You’ll see an idea introduced in a game early in the list, then grow and improve over time as you move through the years until there are games towards the end that feel like several ideas and learned lessons culminating into bigger, more elaborate productions.

That being said, not every game on this list is going to be a certified banger for every player. There’s a wide selection of genre, as well as complexity and that mythical force we refer to in shorthand as “polish.” There are games here I booted up, played for a couple minutes, and moved on from. I probably won’t play Bug Hunter ever again, for example. But there are other games like Grimstone, a full-by-god wild west JRPG, that I will absolutely go back to and see all the way to the end. It almost feels like I’ve gone back to my formative years playing around with emulators and huge ROM lists, going through and finding what resonated with me while taking in little pieces of everything. Fist Hell felt like a bad version of River City Ransom, while Valbrace is a strange hybrid of Wizardry and Punch-Out that feels like nothing I’ve ever played before. It’s an eclectic mix, and each individual piece contributes to the overall bigger picture of UFO Soft as an entity.

It's also worth noting that as fun as these games can be, there's a sort of line being toed between authenticity and approachability. A lot of the games in the collection are tough even by the standards of their era, mostly because a lot of them give you one life and no continues. If you die, you simply start right back at the beginning. Other games that are more substantive may offer multiple lives or chances, but it's still a harsh Game Over when you use them up. Features like rewind or unlimited continues may clash with the idea that you're literally cleaning up and playing old cartridges in the narrative, but some kind of compromise would have made trying to really dive into and complete each game a more appealing venture. To UFO 50's credit, the longer games (especially the RPGs) do have auto-saving and checkpoint systems. But having auto-save kind of invalidates the earlier remark about authenticity, so there's a little inconsistency there anyway. 

UFO 50 is like stumbling across a time capsule and discovering a wealth of lost knowledge inside. And yet, it’s entirely a singular work of fiction. That by itself is deeply fascinating and makes this thing worth playing. Even if you pass over most of the games and only find a few that stick with you from a fun perspective, the depth on a conceptual level is absurd and gratifying to simply think about. We’re living at a time in which older games are vanishing from both physical reality and our sort of collective cultural well at an increasing rate, when remakes are seen as replacements for original work and curiosity to seek out history is dwindling unless there’s a purchasable remaster. UFO 50 is fun to play and take at face value, but it also highlights how age really isn’t a detriment to having a great time and engaging with games.

UFO 50 is available now for PC. The game was purchased by Shacknews for this review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.