UFO 50

Great parody of Action 52, except all the games are good. Really, really, good. Easiest recommend of my life.

The sheer scope of this game is completely and utterly ludicrous and yet against all odds it succeeds spectacularly.

Like, seriously, it's 50 entire games. Which'll take you at LEAST 150 hours to 100%. I'm 55 hours in and I've barely scratched the surface.

The concept of "50 games in 1" seems like a gimmick, but somehow UFO 50 not only breaks past that expectation, it delivers 50 unique, fun, and inspiring games. I keep finding myself coming back to UFO 50 again and again, whether to try something new or chase a gold or cherry cartridge. Through playing these games, I haven’t just had a great time, I’ve also learned more about how I challenge myself and approach problem solving.

An absolute masterclass in game design. 10/10.

I've barely scratched the surface of this package of games and it is just so, so good. Mortol and cyber owls are too that I really like but again there's 50 games I've only played like five. I think this is well worth supporting this developer for such a cool package of amazing games. It's like a Nostalgia trip for games that didn't exist in the '80s and have been created in 2024 with the benefit of 40 Years of game design knowledge. I'm itching to try some of the metroidvania and RPGs in this collection. Worth it at full price. I'm really hoping the developers will come out with a sequel with 16-bit games in this man. They have a brilliant team over there and excited to see what else they come up with

In Short. It's an amazing collection of fun games and has a lot of variety and plenty of games to dig into.

Also despite what Steam says, I have almost 60 hours as of posting and most of it was offline.

Now here's my more in depth trash amateur review.




A real love letter to Video Games that makes you remember why Video Games can be amazing and fun!

Each game is vastly different and while it can be obvious to where some of their inspirations are at times, they still add something unique and new adding for some very interesting and fresh games. The span of genres and setting is very varied and neat, but can also crossover with certain games with appearances of some characters and especially assets overlapping between games that's also an in universe reason from the fictional Company UFO Soft.

Being a part of a fictional Console from a fictional Company there's many neat tidbits about the Console and Company in each game's info text. There's also a hidden meta narrative about UFO Soft themselves

It's hard to choose, but some of my personal favorites are Avianos, Hyper Contender, Party House, Bushido Ball and Elfazar's Hat. They're the ones I've enjoyed the most so far and after 60 hours of playing some of each game, I'm still just scratching the surface as some games can be beat fairly quickly while others can take up multiple hours for a playthrough.

The difficulty for each game can vary, but do take in mind that the clear obvious inspiration of especially the NES lives of to that era of Video Games in less so jank for most games but instead challenge. The games can be very tough, but fair.

There's 50 whole games to choose from and some games have mini-games and even micro-games in themselves so there's always something to play. When they say "Play Forever" they mean it.

classic game ideas born in an alternate dimension. incredible concept and execution. wish I could actually beat more than 5 of these games tho

The LX-II was actually my first game console, so I'm super happy to finally have a bunch of games from it and then some ported onto steam!
$30 is an outright steal, especially since they haven't had any official releases outside of this, plus the unreleased Devilition, which I'm sad I never got to play. Honestly I haven't been able to put this down, because when I get bored of one game, I just switch to another. I genuinely feel like I'm in school again and I'm staying up late on a weekend haha. I also finally get to go back and beat some of the games I never got to finish, like Velgress and replay some classics from the Arcade like Magic Garden (so many quaters lost....)
Some of the emulation is a tad bit choppy at some times, but it's worth it since a majority of these games were considered lost media for over 30 years. Plus, they added widescreen support for pretty much every single title!

UFOsoft was such a huge innovator especially for their time, there is an endless amount of variety in every single game, and as the slogan says, I can see myself truly Playing Forever.

This game is everything your parents thought they were buying for you when they saw that 50-games-in-one cartridge that actually turned out to be trash. For around 50 cents per game, I've gotten double digits worth of hours in just single entries. And there's 50 of them! Devilition, Rail Heist, Pilot Quest, Rock On! Island, and Party House are my favorites (I've cherried the first three). Every game is unique and has modern design philosophies woven in:

Waldorf's Journey has Jump King and Spelunky quirks to it. Velgress is a roguelike shooter with Kid Icarus platforming. Party House is a deck builder. Pilot Quest is an idle resource management plus Zelda action adventure game. Overbold is an arena-style bullet hell survival game. Valbrace is a first person maze crawler with RPG-style combat and spellcasting. Night Manor is a point-and-click puzzle horror game. Paint Chase is Splatoon with cars.

These are just a few examples. There's also racing games, fighting games, alien racer gambling, golfing, puzzle games, strategy games, physics games, shooters, run-and-guns, tower defense, tons of roguelike exploration games, and multiplayer games. There's even a full story driven RPG in here. Oh, and did I mention there's an optional ARG built around the in-game lore?

I've only finished a FIFTH of the collection since release. Who knows if I ever finish all of this. I think I'll have to play forever.

Addendum: I've streamed most of my playtime of this game on Youtube! You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEm_IugWE1yiFkNN_UFatu8Atezijd1z1

Great variety and some real gems. In distilling what a game is, true elegance of design emerges.

I originally bought this title on release... and refunded it.

The first two games really put me off, then the 3rd just reminded me of shitty arcade scrollers from way back when. I refunded it in frustration - Barbuta's controls were ass, I didn't feel like learning the ins and outs of something like the bug game at the time, and the ninja sidescroller reminded me of all the bullshit of games of this era.

Honestly, starting with Barbuta is probably the worst decision ever... but it ends up being brilliant if you get sucked into the overarching meta-story of UFOSoft's and the LX-III's history. Barbuta being complete ass is done with intention and ends up making sense... I still can't get over how brilliant it actually ends up being.

I ended up re-buying it, feeling as if I hadn't given it a fair shot. The idea of UFO 50 kept itching at me and I'm so glad I repurchased this title.

This is probably one of the most ambitious titles I've ever played. Forget WoW, GTA, or Garfield Kart, UFO 50 isn't just ambitious, but it executes on that ambition flawlessly.

More than just a rose-tinted love-letter to games of yore, UFO 50 oozes with originality and charm. Familiar games are here like a Double Dragon knockoff, sidescrollers, and puzzle games, but so are novel and interesting titles like Valbrace which reminds me a lot of Stonekeep. Or Mortol which is such a unique concept from the gameplay, to the shared pool of "lives" between levels. And don't get me started on Camouflage - my first cherry'd title - or Warptank, Valbrace, Party House, or Rail Heist.

Not every game was incredible, but the vast majority are, and all of them bring something unique or novel to the table and play a part in the overarching story of UFOSoft.

If you grew up in the NES era and renting games from Blockbuster, then UFO 50 is a must-have. Start Pilot Quest ASAP as it "Used the clock features of the LX-III to generate resources even when the game was closed."

I've only scratched the surface of UFO 50, and I've played a good amount of it. I've cherried 5 out of the 50 games in this collection and they were all ridiculously fun, and I can't wait to dive into more.

All that to say, it doesn't take much playtime at all to recognize that this is a once-in-a-lifetime game. UFO 50 is a collection of fully fledged games of such staggeringly consistent quality, and it strings them all together with a meta-narrative about a game publishing company riding the gaming boom of the 80s. The fact that a game like this exists is mind blowing.

This may very well be a game I return to in a few years and give a perfect score.

50 full-fledged games. Not only are some utter masterpieces in and of themselves, but even the less amazing ones are still lovely. If at worst you find an entry you don't like, that's fine, try one of the other 49 and I'm sure you'll find something.

simply a delightful achievement. full of wonder and beauty. i think it puts forth a thesis of a beautiful kind of game development. i like mooncat and zoldath the most...

This game sounds like a good time until you actually play it and realize none of the games are fun.

It's very hard to write down something specific about UFO 50, just because there's SO MUCH of it. Basically - it's a collection of 50 fully-fledged NES/SNES style games, created by an imaginary game developer. Except they have none of the old-timey jank and have lots of new and unique game design ideas. And yes, it's literally illegal to talk about UFO 50 without saying "game design ideas".

There's a:
* Strategy game, where all your units are discs that you launch into enemy discs, to cause them to ricochet from one another. Imaging curling, but with ogres
* Rogue-like deck builder about making the coolest party in town, where you have to manage popular people, rich people and trouble makers in your deck
* Super Metroid but VVVVVV
* Proto-immersive sim
* Proto-uhhh, Civilization? Or Heroes of Might & Magic? I'm not sure, but you pray to cool dinosaurs
* An atmospheric first person horror point & click quest
* 2D Splatoon
* A platformer where you have to use your dead bodies to make it through the level
* PINBALL GOLF (greatest idea in history of humanity)
* Surprisingly interesting stealth-puzzle about being a chameleon

...and more.
Some of it even has couch multiplayer!

Also there's a greatest achievement system ever: each game has 1 achievement, and if you earn it - a cute little piggie will get a gift from that game. That's what I call motivation.

It gets a bit overwhelming if you keep playing UFO 50 back to back to back, but after the initial excitement of discovery wears off it becomes a great in-between game for Steam Deck - if you have some time to kill, then UFO 50's got options for ya.

The experience of playing UFO 50 is picking a game and being shocked by the depth and love that went into it, getting hooked on it for a bit, then being drawn back to the imposing menu of 50 games to dust another off and repeat the process. You would think at some point the surprise would wear off but UFO 50 is consistently delightful to a degree that continues to shock again and again.

I recommend this incredible gem of a game to anyone who knew early video games or people wanting to discover how gaming evolved during the early days. It is an absolute delight, I am having mad fun with it

Do you have a special nostalgia for the 8-bit era? If so, you should absolutely pick this game up. Mossmouth has created an alternative universe of games that feel like they could have been from the 8-bit era but have modern QoL features that feel great. There are 50 varied games in here covering a ton of genres, you will easily find a handful if not several dozen that are wonderful. Many of the games also have local multiplayer. This is an incredibly well thought out and put together collection of games. Even if you did not play anything from the 8-bit era you will find some wonderful gems in here.

It has great value, and I can acknowledge that. I particularly was hopin for more modern gameplay but it really does FEEL like playing 80's games. which, if that's your thing then get this. it's way too slow for me.

UFO 50 is a collection of 50 different retro games that were inspired by classics from the NES era. You probably won't like every game in here but with such a large collection you will have enough alternatives to play. The game tries it's best to emulate the feeling of these old games including graphics, sound design and even their jankiness. Barbuta, the very first game in this list, stands out as being a very obscure game with no directions given, a very terrible control scheme and extremely hard gameplay, which is what most of those old games were at that time.
There are tons of different genres here, classic arcade games with high scores, shoot 'em ups, platformer even rogue-likes and full RPGs. It's interesting how creative some of these games are and these aren't even small games, each one of these feels like it could have been sold individually.
Listing every single game would be a bit too long, so I will describe some of my favourites.

Bug Hunter is a tactics game in which you have to kill bugs that spawn inside a mine. You must fulfill your quota if you want to finish your day but you only have a limited amount of turns to do so. The bugs will never attack you but they will evolve every turn which gives them some special abilites that makes it more difficult to kill them and if you don't destroy their eggs, they will swarm the mine and you loose. You have a limited amount of movement and attack abilities but if you collect energy cubes you can buy new ones that replace older ones. The only goal here is to kill enough bugs for your quota, how you reach your goal is up to you. It's a very fun game with many different abilities and tactics to try out for such a small game.

The Big Bell Race is a little racing game similiar to Mario Kart of F-Zero but with controls similiar to Flappy Bird. You play as one of multiple ufo racers and your method of transportation is to hold the button to hover in the air and release it to lose height. That way you have to navigate through the obstacle course and finish multiple laps. You can also "slash" at other racers if you are near them, which damages them. Racers have limited hit points and get destroyed if they lose all of them, whcih sends them back to the beginning of their current lap. The racing track will also spawn power ups that can be used against your opponents. A fun little game despite the unusal controling scheme.

Waldorf's Journey is a platformer with the difference that you charge and release your jumps in a target direction. You basically fling yourself into the direction you want to travel. You have to try to land on the floating platforms because if you fall off the screen you have to restart from the beginning. There are some tools that can help you on your journey including birds that rescue you if you fall in the abyss. The goal is to reach the end of the level which isn't that long but it's really hard. It's a great game for a short round between some of the longer games.

Party House is a deck builder with different "scenarios". Each scenario has their own selection of party guests and your goal is to "throw the best party" by inviting four VIPs. To get these VIPs however you have to recruit a bunch of other party guests first. There are two resources, popularity and monhey. Popularity is used to invite more guests to your party (which act as extra cards for your deck) while money expands the maximum amount of guests you can have (the amount of cards you can play). The gameplay itself is very simple, you reveal one guest after another from your deck, after each guest you can decide to invite another until the house is full. There are however trouble makers which, if there are too many, will end the party and give you no resources. You have to juggle the different party guests and decide how many you want and which of them you need. It's surprisngly complex and even has a random mode.

Divers is an obscure and dark RPG. You play as three lizard people that dive into an ocean to explore underwater ruins. What makes this game so interesting is how little it tells you about itself. There are no explanations, items in the shop don't tell you what they do, you don't know what your goal is except that you have to dive deeper. Items have limited use, so you always have to return to the surface to heal, save and refill your items. The game also makes use of a limited sight range, which adds to the uneasiness that you will feel during the game. There are sea monsters everywhere that are often outside your sight and suddenly come in view and start chasing you, there is no map, so you don't know where you are and you will get lost while you try to evade monsters. I really love this scary atmosphere that the game has.

Overbold is probably my favourite game in this collection. It's a small arena roguelike similiar to the Binding of Isaac but inside a single room. You have to survive 8 fights in the arena and after each fight you can spend the prize money on upgrades. What makes this game so much fun is that it entices you to risk more than you can manage. After each fight you can decide to raise the prize money but this will add more enemies to the next fight. The last fight will always have a full arena including a boss, so you have to be prepared for it but if you risk too much too early you might lose and have to restart. It's incredobly addictig, especially since each run is so short and you can play multiple runs back to back.

Vainger is a classic metroidvania heavily inspired by Metroid. The main gimmick here is that you can jump again in midair to flip your personal gravity, allowing you to walk on ceilings. This simple feature changes completely the level design and how you approach each room. Some enemies and obstacles react to your flip ability and will change. Another great feature is how upgrades work in this game. The game does not have many ability upgrades but you can slot them in one of three different mechanics, your gun, your body and your gravity flip ability. This changes how an upgrade works, the fire ability for example enhances your gun in that way that it can detonate exploding barrels and also deal more damage to enemies but if you slot it in your body it will instead protect you from high temperature, allowing you to travel through hot rooms without taking damage. Since you can only switch these upgrades on save stations, you have to approach each section of the game differently.

Pilot Quest is a mix between an idle game and a Zelda-like adventure. Your ship crashes on a planet and you have to find the three missing parts to repair it. At the start you are inside a camp that has a big crystal that you can mine for smaller crystals. These crystals can be used to buy plants that produce more crystals or you can smelt them into an ingot which is used to build various buildings. You will hire helpers that help you produce more stuff and the game will continue producing even when you play another game. At some point you will explore the world but you have only limited time depending on how much meat you have. Time acts also as health, enemies will deduct from your time instead of hurting you. There are several dungeons in the worold that you must explore to find your ship parts. These dungeons also have bosses that mus be defeated first. Although the time mechanic can be somewhat annoying, it is fun to play this between other games and come back to it to collect your progress and explore the world again.

I sampled 7 games at random, and I hated them all. I don't have the energy to continue.

I'll keep trying the other games, but so far, most of these are gimmicky throw-away games.

The one that angered me the most was the super-slow "Metroidvania" style game where you have no attack distance, and moving is comically slow.

The presentation, music, sprite work, color palette is wonderful, but these games aren't really that good.

While in the handful of the games I tried they are nostalgic the controls feel sluggish and unresponsive just like older games and it makes the whole thing very under whelming. Its like they purposely used the bad game design along with the good.

Half the games here could be minigames. (That's saying something considering there are 50 actual minigames hidden inside one of the games.) Rest of the games could each have been like a week long game jam project, or a flash game haphazardly put together. (In the case of one game in particular, it's literally a flash game haphazardly put together, that was later repackaged into UFO 50.)
I'm going to try really hard, and format this review into something readable. Please bear with me.

The well of UFO 50 discourse online has been thoroughly poisoned by people complaining about the difficulty, or by people complaining that it's not hecking nostalgic enough, and so on. I will not make those points. I'm also completely okay with there being, say, roguelites in this collection, even though they do not make sense for the supposed time period.

My main gripe is that on the whole, it doesn't really understand the era it's trying to imitate. Most games have hindrances seemingly only because old games had those. They also lack quality of life features for the same reason. Old games didn't, so UFO 50 doesn't either.

UFO 50 sits at an uncomfortable mid-point. It makes aesthetic choices fit for a modern indie, but keeps to the old-school design sensibilities. In the process, appearing to misunderstand why "old games sucked". I find this hard to believe. Maybe it was a conscious decision, coming from a need to convince the players that, "Yes, really, you're playing a retro collection. Don't believe me? Look how janky it is, and look at how many enemies I can spam". Maybe yet, it's not worth the speculation in the first place. Maybe the biggest tell is that any old 50-in-1 NES rompack blows UFO 50 out of the water.

Back to the metaphorical well. There are divisive titles here. It's no surprise that a single person isn't going to enjoy all 50 games. When you say one game has really terrible design, someone will surely point out that they personally enjoyed it. Maybe you should try enjoying it too. This is wishful thinking.
Let's use two shmups to get the ball rolling.

Star Waspir has a terrible, nauseating scrolling background, is barely over 5 minutes long and the scoring is broken. Caramel Caramel has, what I believe to be, a broken lives system that is somehow more punishing than outright resetting the game. Old consoles had a lot of shmups so UFO 50 has to have them too. Except, likely, Mossmouth doesn't understand or appreciate these much. That's fine on its own, you are absolutely allowed to not like a genre... until you try to make like 4 of them for a commercial product.

Am I being pedantic because I happen to like this one genre and feel let down? Well, shockingly? No, not really. Another example to set it in, Fist Hell. It has finicky controls. Meta game is dominated by spamming basic jabs at the bottom of the screen because of a quirk with the hitboxes. Throwing sucks, so does grabbing. Playable characters barely spice up the gameplay, and the bosses in particular are terrible. This shows a clear lack of understanding for what makes brawlers fun. It also shows a genuinely worrying lack of playtesting and balancing.

I am now going to cut myself off, I can't go game by game pointing out flaws. I mean, I totally can, but I don't want to. Just know that this problem is pervasive. Let's get down to the nitty-gritty, and close off. I will give a final resolution at the end. Hopefully this review hasn't been a bore.

I offhandedly mentioned achievements. There are both achievements in-game and on Steam. The achievements on Steam are boring. The diegetic achievements have three tiers. Gold cartridge, gift and cherry. Gold cartridges are your usual completion goals. Gifts are generally easier and more lateral, for example, the gift for Fist Hell is tied to surviving 9 waves in the optional endless mode. Gifts are added to your garden alongside your virtual pet as eye candy. Hands down, my favorite feature in UFO 50. Finally, cherries are the peak of completion, generally requiring you to get all endings, complete all stages without dying, maintain a ridiculous win streak, or finish the game with all playable characters. These... suck. They're uninspired and grindy as all hell. If the average cherry was a Steam achievement for a standalone game, half the negative reviews would be complaining about how asinine it is. I understand some people do genuinely like going for all the cherries. I also think it's worth a mention how lazy it all feels.

We are almost there. One last thing to mention and it's a little technical.

This game is buggy, for example like, right now? I can't go into video options because my game crashes when I do that. I had to find a workaround with the config file. They also coded in some kind of contingency so if you're inside one of the games, a bug doesn't outright crash, but just hardlocks your game with all strings replaced with "nostring" or whatever. This is, I'll be blunt, freaking weird. They went the extra mile to make sure not to ruin your immersion, but didn't go another to make sure bugs don't happen in the first place. The game has been out for a while, come on. That's just lame.

I should maybe touch on some of the things UFO 50 does well. Those would be, broadly speaking, style, or rather immersion, and to another extent, music. Campanella's Stage B theme is super catchy and has been stuck in my head for a good while now. There are others too of course but if I had to name a singular favorite track from this collection, it would be that. Presentation is top notch if the stuff I touched upon doesn't get on your nerves like it did mine.

Some of the games are fun. Seaside Drive is fun. I neglected mentioning it because it reads more like an insult. "Yes, there is indeed one good game among the fifty, and it's the one Mossmouth didn't design". Read it that way if you want. I had fun playing Seaside Drive and found myself wishing it was a full title I could play with my friends without having to coax them into buying 49 unrelated games first. Depending on my mood, I might list 3 or 5 other games I had fun playing through. Mooncat is always going to be in that group. Nothing comes close to that transcendental experience.

Not to pull my punches at the very end but I'm confident you'll enjoy at least 5 games from this collection. And 5 games for 10 bucks is a steal. If you like stealing, you'll like this. Then again, if you like stealing that much, steal a 50-in-1 NES rompack and have ten times the fun for, well, zero times the price. I'm never writing a review this long ever again. You have no idea how grueling actually putting into words how grueling actually playing UFO 50 was. It really is a singular experience through and through. And that's as good a resolution as any, I think. Take care.

This game is a mirror to your own human psyche.

The more you invest in UFO 50 the more you get out of it.

Maybe my favorite gaming experience of all time.

Learned new things about myself, tried some things ive never tried before. I like bullet hells now! I don't think i would have ever given the genre the time of day without trying to engage with each title as much as possible.

There are so many innovations here big and small. Chances taken, that would be a commercial failure most likely, if sold independently. How about trying a control scheme thats never been done before (mooncat)? How about innovating on genres in small foundational ways that change the whole vibe and experience (waldorfs journey). How about making a fantastic bag building game ala Quacks of Quindlenburg but as a small little game about throwing a party (party house).

I could go on and on and on. Every single game has value. This is a game for people who love games. For people who have played ALOT of games. People who know the lineage and design principles and conventions of gaming and want to see what else can be done, while still showing huge admiration for whats come before them. This game stands in stark contrast to what modern AAA games are becoming. It is so pure. Its as pure as the era of games it pays homage too. Its a modern recreation of the sincerity, innovation, and tenacity of the NES era but with modern design sensibilities.

Video games forever.

Very solid game collection. Worth it just for Mini and Max. Pretty much every game is amazing, especially the strategy games and the short arcadey ones. My favorite of those being bug hunter and magic garden respectively. I don't want to make this too long so I'm just going to talk about my top 10.

1. Camouflage: You play as a lizard blending into the environment to save your baby lizard and get to your hidey hole. Very fun, only issue with this is it's a shorter game (around an hour or so.)

2. Pingolf: 18 courses of golf with pinball bumpers, enemies that steal your speed, and barrels that slow you down. Very satisfying to slowly get better at and great music.

3. Elfazars Hat: This feels like a classic game but new. Top down run and gun with cute characters and fun bosses. The upgrade system is really fun too, there a lot to experiment with.

4. Mini and Max: Shrink down to explore a closet and find all sorts of cool npcs to trade with and do quests for. This one is really long and the world is so big (even though you're tiny lol)

5. Bug Hunter: Shoot bugs before time runs out in this turn based strategy game where you can upgrade your movement and shooting abilities on the fly.

6. Mortol: Trade your lives for progress and make your way through with as many lives as you can hold. The better you do on older stages makes new stages easier. Really fun to optimize and the current wr for most lives keeps going up with new community discoveries. (one of the most fun games to watch)

7. Warptank: Explore a strange cave system as a tank that can teleport on command. Shoot the bad guys and find all the secrets. Great music too.

8. Magic Garden: What if snake had a bit more depth? Find oppies (slime creatures) and drop them off to get potions to defeat bloppies (blue oppies) similarly to pac-man ghosts. Lots of fun advances strategies like upgrading potions by dropping off a lot at once (9) and jumping over enemies/your oppie tail.

9. Onion Delivery: One of the most brutal games in the collection but also very fun to slowly get better at/learn the dropoff locations. Play as an onion taxi trying to drop off as many onions as you can in the time limit. Each day brings with it new challenges and you only have a limited number of lives so be careful. Don't be like me and immediately disparage the game when you have trouble, it's worth sticking with it.

10. Party House: Manage your party and add strong new guests but be careful to not draw too many wild buddies or overfill your building. Can you get all 4 star guests to show up at once and win? or are you doomed to have 500 wild buddies? The random mode makes it endlessly replayable.

UFO 50 is my game of the year for 2024, some of the coolest games/ideas are in this. Pretty much every game has something in it to love. Thank you devs for making something so amazing <3 If you'd like to see me play this game blind check out my youtube playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgH8GoEgXVYFsrjBtLW2XOOKIJPrAiYvE

There are single games in the collection worth the asking price alone. Now multiply that by 50 and you get the idea. There is literally something for almost everyone and every game has been at least charming with nearly all being genuinely very fun and engaging. Its difficult to write a full review without literally going over every game, which is probably the biggest complement I can give this collection.
These are not mini games. Many aren't even something I'd consider short. Games like Mini and Max or Grimstone are standard for their genres for the time the games "take place" in, and every game genre covered has a representative that I would consider well above average for the genre, not even for "the time", but for the modern day.

Shout out to all of my devilition, rail heist and grimstone heads reading this. Maria is the coolest cowgirl ever, and I hope to biggum that we blast all those smug dancing imps to kingdom come.

As someone who has no interest in retro games, I would not have paid attention to this collection at all had it not been for Dunkey's showcase video. Even with that video, I watched for 30 seconds and closed it thinking all 50 games would be like Barbuta. (Barbuta ended up being one of my favorites.) After trying the video again on a whim I was surprised by the creativity of some of the later games. I waited for a sale but would have been happy with the game at full price.

I love the feeling of opening a new game and immediately jumping into it, with no tutorials and minimal fluff. I love how quickly I can close and move to another game if I'm burning out on the current one. I love how cohesive the visual and sound design are. It's truly a gem and I highly recommend it.

It's 50 full games for the price of one, not all of them are gonna be the game for everyone, however there's guaranteed something in here for everyone.

Started off on the wrong foot with [01] Barbuta, felt odd to open the pack with an underwhelming and sluggish experience. Was the intent to encourage you to try something else? [02] Bug Hunter was much better but grid turn-based tactics aren't really my thing. Died in the auto-scroller [03] Ninpek once and moved on... oh hey, [04] Paint Chase is actually pretty fun. And [05] Magic Garden is basically Snake-Pacman?

Over the next few hours it got easier to tell which ones I wanted to skip or pour more time into. [15] Block Koala has enough puzzles to be a standalone release? It was also cool seeing how the in-universe developer turned [17] Campanella into two 'sequels' and a spin-off racing game, while rebranding as 'UFOSoft'. Often you'll boot up a cartridge like [20] WarpTank, think it's going to take 15 minutes, and then 4 hours later you roll credits on the campaign.

Some favourites: In [25] Party House you collect and roll for guests that show up at your door every night, without causing the police to ruin the fun. Or, plan a stealthy [28] Rail Heist before making a mad dash out in one piece. Finally, [44] Pilot Quest is a hybrid idle/adventure where a ticking timer also serves as your health bar when exploring.

Honestly, some of the games in this pack just aren't my thing. But they're all well-designed! The variety, quality and depth you get for the price is really great.

A great collection of retro-ish games, both arcade-ish and some with longer playtimes and plots. While I would call almost no individual game a must play, and a few just bad, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and a few games are quite excellent. There's even a secret metagame that ties the metaplot together.

One piece of advice for anyone new to the game: Don't leave "Pilot Quest" for last

The concept put me off at first, and I really didn't like a lot of the top reviews praising the game simply for being "great value"; anyone who has bought a bundle of a full series simply because you were curious about one game/the series broadly and it was 90% off knows that this isn't a good enough reason to justify buying something. What if I only like one of these 50 games? How long are these games anyway? Surely not that long. These are all fair concerns to have about this product.

However, there is so much creativity here that eventually I started playing games I wouldn't choose to play otherwise; it's great at getting you to experience something interesting from a wide array of genres, and even when games haven't initially been appealing, I've come back to them and found something interesting from them. If you enjoy exploring unique game design or often play indie games, this is definitely for you. If you like to explore older gen games or just wanted a collection of games to explore, I would recommend this highly.

What convinced me to eventually purchase this collection was hearing about a couple of specific games, so I will give my highlights for this collection:

Warptank: You control a tank that can teleport in the direction it's facing. It's fun to adapt to this strange method of movement and the puzzle elements mix really well with the action/"platforming".

Lords of Diskonia: A lot of elements from Fire Emblem here but the core battle mechanic is based on Carrom, the important elements of which resemble Snooker or Pool where you are rebounding circular objects. The strategic and overworld elements add a lot of interest to the mechanics of rebounding disks, and the positioning part that makes Fire Emblem so interesting is exponentially more engaging from the difficult techniques that come from the battle mechanics.

Valbrace: An old school "first person" maze dungeon crawler, but with an active battle mechanic. Like Diskonia, you can win encounters with worse gear/stats by practicing the techniques. Another twist is a really cool pattern-based spell mechanic, once you learn the spells you can use them in parts of the game "before" you should have known them, making repeat playthroughs still quite fun.

Campanella: A difficult game where you control a flying saucer, the mechanic is hard to master but very fun. A couple other games use the same mechanic too, I recommend The Big Bell Race alongside this one.

Camouflage: A puzzle game where you blend into the background and have to figure out the right order/timing to successfully sneak past enemies. This is one of the first ones I tried and I highly recommend it.

The two games that got me to purchase this collection after reading about them were Mooncat and Mini & Max. I won't spoil them, but Mini & Max in particular shocked me multiple times and it's almost worth getting the collection just for that game.

After 100 hours, I still haven't even opened every game. I think the collection is so massive that it does a good job on its own of discouraging you from going through it all at once too quickly or trying to just go for the achievements, but definitely go in with the mindset that this is a slow burn and to just allow yourself to try games as you go. One of the best parts this collection takes inspiration from of NES/8-bit games generally is the abundance of secrets, some telegraphed and others just completely hidden, which are always fun to discover accidentally. Try to go into this as blind as possible but if anything piques your interest then do feel free to look into it further.

It is a marvel that this collection does so much with so many original and strange characters, yet remains charming throughout with a commendably high level of quality consistant throughout.

An absolutely insane experience! It would be enough that you release 50 games that are passable, but each and every one has a depth and satisfying richness that leaves me breathless in their love and complexity. The standardised text formats, the occasionally repeating sprites and sound effects give it such a sense of presence, like it really was a console that existed, a real 80's game dev team behind it. And, it's hardly surprising really, given that the devs behind these games are truly outdoing themselves with each an every entry.

Let me be clear here, I would still reccommend this game, even if it had HALF of the games it currently does. 50p per game, some of which are fully-fledged many-hour campaigns, you will not find a better collection on all of steam.

You'd think there's no way they could make a 50-game collection with a 90% or better hit rate but somehow they pulled it off. I would be shocked if another collection like this came out in the next few decades.

This game is interesting because it has the "desert-island" quality of tons and tons of replayability, but almost all of it is completely handmade. I'll probably still be firing this game up in 10 years when elder scrolls 6 finally comes out

This game slaps and I haven't even tried more than half of the available games yet. Each game feels like it could have been it's own cult classic Gameboy game, easy to pick up but each having a surprising amount of depth to sink your teeth in. I love Bushido Ball.

This game (or rather collection of games) is a parody of Action 52 (look it up if you are unfamiliar) and I use that word "parody" in the most salutatory sense: whereas the 52 games that make up the latter are only marginally playable and in no way marketable on their own, these games are all tip-top and I could easily see them individually listed and priced... well, in a way that adds up to more than the current price-tag.

I do want to take some time to complain about the achievements though. While there is something for everybody here, not everything will appeal to everyone. You may notice some very low percentages of folks who get all the achievements. This is not because the games are particularly hard, but they are so diverse that few people will be interested in mastering certain niche genres of gameplay that would would not normally appeal to them. Therefore, the idea of assigning achievements for such-and-such number of completed games is not necessarily the way to go. I think it would have been better for the community if the achievements would indicate which games in particular we have completed (like one achievement for beating Grimstone, one for beating Cheetahmen... er, I mean Cyber Owls and so forth) thereby allowing us to share additionally what kind of gaming experiences suites our tastes and connect with like-minded gamers. I get that the devs probably want as many people to play as many of the games as possible and I am not sure anything can be done about that now, but it is what I would have done.

But yeah, all that aside, this collection is a masterpiece of world-building, innovation, and nostalgia. As I said before, there is something for everybody (especially if you are into retro-style games like me) while the variety, challenge and fun of these games makes it an excellent investment any way you look at it. Personally, I think it is almost worth having just for... nope! I promised myself I would not go into any of the games specifically. I have gone on enough as it is.

"50 games? Surely it's just a bunch of short experiences or stuff that you play once and move on."
No, really, 50 whole games, some of them as long if not longer than a lot of triple A games on the market today; and many with substantially more depth and enjoyment to be had than those triple A games. All this was done as a labor of love for a bygone era of video games. That love comes across, too, as anyone familiar with the era of games that UFO 50 is based on can and will find themselves completely sucked in to the experience of uncovering these in-lore hidden gem games. Oh, yeah, there's also a meta narrative you can experience playing all of the games as the developers and company grows and develops. It's fantastic, both as a game and the actual games.

so nice of derek to include 49 other games with velgress

ufosoft was really ahead of its time, thank you for archiving these classics!

The craftsmanship and care put into each game is undeniable. But the tongue-in-cheek difficulty and punishment make it just a little too much work to be fun.

Try it out, watch some videos; decide whether or not it's something that would tickle your fancy.

It's awesome. You may not vibe with every game, you need to accept that some of them are harder then others, but it's a great experience to try to understand new game, learn it and beat it or even master it.

Strong recommendation from me.

These aren't just some small mini-games - this is a collection of 50 quality games, many requires hours to beat! You may struggle at first at choosing what to play as most games here require some time to get used to. Unsurprisingly, many of them also feature mechanics that has became discredited in modern games (e.g. lives system) so there's a high chance your first impression will be negative. Keep this in mind and try to have an open mind for them.

Now, to the games that I liked the most (I will update this review as I play more games):

Night Manor is a point-click horror game where you try to escape a spooky mansion. Cliche? Yeah sure, but the story is interesting enough anyway - although the story isn't the highest point of the game. Where the game truly shines is puzzles! No other PnC game ever was going so smoothly for me: literally every quest makes sense, and I only really stumbled twice for the entire game, and I solved them anyway without any outside help.
Visuals and music create an incredible atmosphere and the lore bits, while telling a predictable story, still manage to slowly immerse you into the game's world.

Rakshasa is a ghost-n-goblins-like - a very punishing platformer where you're supposed to fight your way from the start to the end with no saves. Sounds horrible? It's not bad at all actually, as the game's runs are fairly short and I believe (I haven't beat the game yet) you can beat the game within 10-15 minutes. But the way to this goal is long, consisting of many, many runs trying to learn the enemies and your character's movements (as they're not very mobile...).
The game has many secret power-ups that you will find as you try to beat it again and again - thus making the early parts easier for you, making it easier to reach the later points and experiment there! And wow, the game has much to show you: visuals are really good and threat variety is nice, giving you a good challenge to overcome.

This would be an incredible game for the sheer amount of effort it most have taken alone.

But the unbelievable consistency and quality of the games within this collection is what really sends it through the roof. There are games in here that make the collection worth it on its own, like Warptank or Mini & Max, but making each of those games just one of 50 is unreal.

If you appreciate indie games, you cannot miss out on trying UFO 50, I promise you that you'll find a few all time favorites in here.

I've played a majority of the games now and honestly I already would have recommended it after a few of them, but they constantly surprise me with how deep and fun every single one of them are. This collection is incredible, nearly every game has been great and the ones I don't like feel more like they're not for me than that they're outright bad games. Definitely worth it for anyone who loves video games, there's something for everybody

This is a game collection that gives you 50 wholly unique games from a made-up timeline. That is a lot of game until you realize the games were fully inspired by real titles from the early 80s. This fact was a bummer at first. I couldn't get very far, nor understand what I was even playing. Once I got to '84, things picked up. The games started clicking, and I started to win/beat some of them.

This is not a collection of itch.io games that are each like 20 minute experiences. These are all significant games that are 1 hr+ specifically made for this title. If it entices you, get it, there's bound to be something you like.

There is something for everyone in UFO 50. The consistency of quality is amazing. Every game has some interesting twist, secret, or thoughtful design that I didn't expect. I have finished 21 of the games, which has taken me 95 hours so far, and I still can't wait to play more.

An absolute steal for the price. It's full of polish, variety, attention to detail, innovative ideas and catchy tunes. Most people who don't like it just got filtered by the difficulty, even though none of the games featured are unfair or even as hard as the ones from the era they draw inspiration from.

I gotta say, at the end of the day, I did not enjoy my time with UFO 50. I lived and played through the era they are aping and, well, they get a lot of it right. But the really high difficulty of most games, the lack of manuals, the purposefully janky controls, all lead up to an experience that's nostalgic but not fun, not for me anyway. I tried every game, and beat 3. The lizard game was my favorite because it wasn't as hard as the others.

For those that enjoy retro games, this is a 10/10. The difficulty is good, the games hook you in, there is tons of variety so there are games for everyone. You may not like every game, but the games that win you over will win you over hard. It is also an interesting art piece about the evolution of a developer without shoving that in your face. It is tied for my GOTY 2024. It is also the perfect Steam Deck game.

I've barely scratched the surface of these games, and it's been an absolute delight each time I try a new one. There are games in this collection that I legit want sequels for. Perfect execution of nostalgia and just plain fun games.

There is an incredible amount of detail and love put into this game. I have almost 40 hours into this and have not even cracked open 25 games yet, and that is not because I'm not curious about them - I simply love the ones I've played too much to move on quite yet. I love games that make you feel nostalgic even if they're brand new, and this game explores just about every genre of retro game you could imagine, and more. Highly recommend!