It’s no secret that we here at Paste love UFO 50. I mean, most people who play it do, but it topped our list of the best games of 2024, and was my personal favorite of the year, too. Framed as a compilation of 50 games made by the game studio UFO Soft in the ’80s, it’s actually a collection of 50 brand new games designed by the developers behind Spelunky, Downwell, and several other great games from the last couple of decades, with a deep, carefully constructed fake history and metanarrative about UFO Soft connecting them all. Despite the retro aesthetics and clear nod to nostalgia, UFO 50 is an utter original—an alternate history of gaming that perfectly evokes the past while embodying the spirit of today. If you somehow haven’t played it yet, go check it out, so we can hopefully stop raving about it.
Given its enormous size and scope, it’s taken us months to be able to write up a list like this with any kind of authority. And although I was hoping to get this up before the end of 2024, it does seem fitting, given UFO 50‘s concept, to run this list in a year other than 2024. If you still need selling on UFO 50, have already dived in but feel overwhelmed by choices, or simply care about my opinions for some weird reason, here’s how I’d rank the best games in UFO 50—for right now, at least.
10. Velgress
One of UFO 50‘s characters, a space mercenary named Alpha, bears more than a passing resemblance to Nintendo’s Samus Aran. The two games starring Alpha are nothing like Metroid, though; the “earlier” of the two, Velgress, owes way more to Ice Climber. You’ll jump ever upwards in this tower game, hopping from one temporary platform that can barely hold your wait to another, with some disappearing almost as soon as you land on them, and others waiting a beat or two before crumbling. Meanwhile enemies will shoot or fly at you, and a bed of spikes are constantly rising beneath you. The goal is to escape through the top of the tower, with everything getting a little faster and more complicated with every floor. And to make it even more challenging, this is one of the UFO 50 games that relies on Spelunky-style randomization, so it has a different layout every time you play it. One of the earliest games within UFO Soft’s fictional canon, Velgress has that combination of simplicity and brutality that defined arcade games; it’s easy to know what to do, but exceedingly hard to actually do it.
9. Warptank
The better of UFO 50‘s two games built on gravity flipping, Warptank is part platformer, part shooter, and part puzzler, with your tank hopping from the floor to the roof and back to take out enemies and tread on new turf. Instead of making its world a single long map, as in the similarly gravity-themed Metroid riff Vainger (which is very good but not enough to make this list), Warptank divides everything up into discrete levels—de facto little puzzle boxes for you to crack—within a larger, overriding world that is its own puzzle to decode. It nails that Mandela effect veritimiltude that this whole project aims for, feeling so much like a game from its era that you can’t imagine that it’s actually not.
8. Mini & Max
UFO Soft’s mascot might be Pilot from the Campanella series (and related spin-offs), but the closest it gets to the company-defining mascot platformer that was mandatory in the ’80s is this game about a size-changing girl and her dog. Accidentally trapped in a room in their home, Mini and Max use their miniaturization powers to discover a secret micro world living on its shelves and within its carpet. Expect more adventure than action, with Mini tracking down the items she’ll need to escape this room while also helping out the various people she’ll meet along the way; you won’t really need quick reflexes or anything to complete this one. Its massive little world is easy to get lost in, though, especially once Mini can shrink down even further and discover another miniature world to explore.
7. Mortol
Mortol is so frustrating that I actually kind of hate it. I can’t deny that it’s a miniature masterpiece, though, and one of the most succinct examples of UFO 50‘s “familiar but original” ethos. Here’s a platformer where you don’t overcome obstacles through objects you pick up, but by sacrificing your own body. You start with 20 lives, and you lose one either through traditional misadventure (getting hit by enemies, falling onto spikes or into pits, etc.) or by invoking one of three “rituals” that will kill you but help you out on your next life. You can hurl your body headfirst into a wall like an arrow, forming a platform your next body can jump onto; you can petrify yourself into a large stone to weigh things down or smash spikes; or you can turn into a human bomb to wipe out enemies or blow up anything that might be blocking your path. For the most part these sacrifices won’t be optional; you’ll have to end a life so that your next one, which respawns immediately on the same screen, can keep pushing forward. You can get extra lives by collecting tokens hidden throughout each level, or occasionally by killing specific enemies, but that pool needs to get you through the entire game. You start each subsequent level with the same number of lives you had at the end of the previous, so it’s easy to find yourself well behind the eight ball in your save file, with only a handful of lives at the start of fiendishly difficult later levels. Mortol doesn’t force you to restart from the beginning with every game, but it makes it so blisteringly difficult to do well if you haven’t been doing well that you’ll want to restart from the first level instead of the latest one you’ve unlocked.
6. Quibble Race
Quibble Race is basically a horse-racing sim that cares more about the gambling than the actual training of horses. Quibbles are little green alien dudes (they remind me of Doozers from Fraggle Rock, but without the hardhats) raised to run races that are bet on by various galactic scoundrels (including Alpha, in one of UFO 50‘s cross-game cameos). You can score massively through gambling, but if you really want to make bank you need to sponsor a quibble, paying for their training and upkeep. The problem is they’re super clumsy and fragile, making them, honestly, a really bad species for racing; they’ll regularly slip and fall throughout races, sometimes even dying halfway through, with their sweet little ghosts immediately ascending into quibble heaven. There’s a fair amount of luck involved here, but also a healthy dose of clear strategy, and you’ll have to pick up on that if you want to finish the season with the most winnings. Like UFO 50‘s best games, Quibble Race starts with a cool idea in a known genre and then becomes deeper, richer, and probably funnier than you expect.
5. Night Manor
Deeply indebted to ICOM point-and-click adventures like Deja Vu and Shadowgate, Night Manor is a genuinely scary horror game about an Amityville-style family annihilator. It’s a good bit easier and less opaque than those cult hits (perhaps because the genre itself is so foreign to younger players), which is a smart decision: it’s a seedy, sordid change of pace from the rest of UFO 50, but not one that will stump you so hard that it becomes a roadblock. (In what is either a very obscure reference or else a complete coincidence, ICOM made a game called Ghost Manor for the TurboGrafx in 1992; there are no other similarities whatsoever, as it’s a pretty rough platformer instead of a point-and-click.)
4. Valbrace
I’m contractually required to call this a “dungeon crawler with Punch-Out combat.” Yes, everything ever written about Valbrace uses some version of that phrase, because it is as accurate as it is concise. You walk through a dungeon in first-person, looking for treasure and items and puzzles to unravel, and whenever you encounter a monster you fight it like you’re Little Mac facing down Soda Popinski, dodging and weaving while getting it strikes when there’s an opening. It’s a fascination combination, especially given how the dungeon layouts are randomized for every game; you’ve got a combat system based largely on recognizing and remembering patterns, inside a game that otherwise flouts memorization. I wouldn’t recommend it to Punch-Out fans who hate dungeon crawlers, but if you’re a big-time dungeon dweller, you’ll get hooked.
3. Grimstone
Tucked away inside of this package of 50 games (plus one) is a full-blown RPG in the style of the original Final Fantasy. We’re talking, like, 20 hours to complete this one, and another 10 to 20 on top of that to see all of it. I am no fan of pure length when it comes to videogames, so it’s very appreciated that Grimstone is an ingenious spin on the golden age of JRPGs. It’s deeper than the Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest games from the NES and early SNES eras, with a more complex approach to combat (it’s turn-based but with a rhythmic timing element akin to the Mario RPGs, and some characters can dual wield, creating up to six potential timed inputs from those characters every attack) and a large pool of party members, not all of whom you’ll be able to play as, and each with their own trauma and understated story to uncover. With its cowboys-and-demons concept and its dualist approach to religion, this Western-set-in-Hell resituates the most timeless storyline in RPG history—”let’s go kill God!”—into a novel and very American context. More than any other game here, Grimstone could be airlifted out of UFO 50 directly onto Steam or the e-Shop right now and become one of the more acclaimed games of the year.
2. Overbold
Overbold is an arena shooter made immaculate by its wager system. For every round you have to bet a certain amount of money that you’ll survive; those winnings are used to buy various upgrades and power-ups. The more money you bet in a round, though, the more enemies will spawn, making the fight harder. The final round is always maxed out, with the most possible enemies thrown at you, including a giant boss that’s, like, part armadillo, part snake, and almost entirely purple, so I don’t know, maybe it’s got some Prince blood in there, too. You’ve got to find the right balance every time out, making Overbold a constantly unpredictable (and enjoyable) high-wire act. A lot of games in UFO 50 could stand on their own, but with a few modernizations Overbold, already perfect for virality, could be a legit smash today.
1. Party House
Despite my well-documented love of Party House, I’m still not sure if it’s actually the best game in here. This has been a really hard thing to rank. I had to stop overthinking it and just go with my gut, and ultimately nothing feels more right than Party House. It’s akin to what’s called a “deck-building game,” where you add to a deck of playable cards during the game through the resources and opportunities opened up by playing cards. Instead of framing itself as a card game, though, Party House is about friends from your rolodex coming to your party; those friends can net you both dollars and popularity points, which can be used to either “buy” new friends between parties, or pay to expand your house, letting you invite more friends to each subsequent shindig. Certain friends party way too hard, though, and if enough of those troublemakers are in your house at one time, the cops come and shut the whole thing down. The trick, if you haven’t already guessed, is that you don’t know which friends are going to show up at your door every time you invite another one to your party; since you want to maximize the turnout at each bash in order to get more money and popularity in order to attract more friends to a larger house the next time you throw a party, you’re incentivized to keep welcoming more friends to the door even when your wild buddies are on the cusp of ruining it all. You’ll perpetually want to risk it because the only way to throw the ultimate party is to have four “starred” friends in your house at one time, and the starred friends require a lot of popularity to befriend. There are only 25 days to throw the ultimate party before the game ends, and there’s no guarantee you’ll even have four starred friends in your rolodex before those days are up. It’s the kind of strategy game where your choices are crucial from the very first turn, but that won’t lock you into failure if you make an early misstep. It’s also really funny without trying that hard at it; the roster of characters you can add to your rolodex includes cartoon renditions of a variety of recognizable stereotypes, from rock stars, gamblers, and monkeys to supernatural beings like leprechauns and genies. UFO 50 is full of brilliantly crafted, well-balanced games that feel unique even when they have obvious inspirations; of them all, though, Party House feels like a true original.
Honorable Mention: Campanella 3, Lords of Diskonia, Porgy, Rail Heist, Star Waspir, Vainger
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.