UFO 50is a treatise in clever game design. I’ve dabbled in maybe a quarter of its offerings so far, and yet I’ve unearthedcountless bangers. Mortol is a personal favourite, Party House is a banger, and Onion Delivery seems underrated among my peers.
Even Barbuta, the abstruse opening game that I think (somewhat intentionally) turns many players off the whole package, has its charm. Games like these have a puzzle to crack and, once you find the right angle of attack, licking up all the delicious yolk is all the more satisfying.
That is never more true than in Mooncat. You play as a… creature. Presumably the eponymous Mooncat? I haven’t finished this game-within-a-game yet, so not everything has been revealed. But you look like a chicken drumstick, and you control about as easily as a dead animal. Every one of the directional arrows on your controller moves this freaky character to the left, and every one of the face buttons moves it right.
Mooncat never explains this to you. You’ve just got to work out this wild control scheme for yourself. And then you’ve got to work out how combinations of buttons make your chicken drumstick jump, ground pound, and roll. Then you have to remember these combinations while avoiding enemies and navigating platforms.
I feel like a gaming granny, approaching my game controller like it’s the steering wheel of an alien spaceship. Except,both of my grannies took to Wii Sports with aplomb. When my parents got me anXbox 360and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for Christmas, me and my brother set them up in split-screen PvP to our raucous enjoyment. They eventually found each other on the map, at which point my dad looked straight into the air and fired his assault rifle at God, and my mum span around in circles looking at the floor.
This is how I feel playing Mooncat. We gamers have a lifetime of muscle memory that we tap into whenever we turn on a console or boot up a PC, and Mooncat turns this on its head. The whole of UFO 50 turns this on its head. It feels like those retro games that desperately tried to innovate, like Alien Resurrection did for the PSX.
That’s the game that created the twin-stick FPS control scheme, whichGameSpot famously calledthe game’s “most terrifying element”.
This is where UFO 50 gets really clever. It isn’t just innovating for innovation’s sake. This is all a part of the game’s central conceit, that it’s a forgotten game from the 1980s. There are secrets to unlock, the developers tried weird things, and that’s why so many of the games have that authentic old-school feel to them. The metanarrative in UFO 50 is as engaging as the half-century of games themselves.
UFO 50 is incredibly clever, and I appreciate how little it gives away. I haven’t felt so dumbfounded by a control scheme since I first turned on Super Mario World 2 on my Game Boy Advance and had to work out how to play a video game. It’s a feeling that no game has replicated since, and a feeling that I didn’t know I wanted to be replicated. But now that I’m cursing my clumsy thumbs for not executing the perfect ground pound, I’m loving this nostalgic sense of discovery.
Not every game in UFO 50 is a banger, but enough of them have the special combination of being original and unique that it evokes a gaming experience that feels simultaneously retro and completely fresh. Honestly, I’m still in disbelief that a developer created50games and is selling them for effectively $0.50 each. Mooncat might be my favourite $0.50 game I’ve ever played (including Blood on the Sand), because it feels like learning how to play video games all over again. And if I wasn’t already struggling with new control schemes and convoluted platforming solutions, I just figured out that you can air dash. I’m disappointed, tired, and oh so excited to master another Mooncat move.
