UFO 50 review: the 8-bit era returns in this fantastic retro collection

UFO 50 Score Details Pros

Great commitment to its fiction
Some truly fantastic games
Wildly inventive twists
Pitch-perfect 8-bit recreations
Tons of challenges to chase

Cons

A handful of duds in the batch

[Editor’s note: UFO 50, the latest game from Spelunky developer Mossmouth, is a fascinating feat. It’s a collection of 50 original 8-bit games that both reference gaming history and iterate on it. Even with a handful of misses in the oddball package, these are lovingly crafted retro throwbacks that encapsulate what made that creative era of gaming so special. It’s also a game that is invested in creating a fiction that its players will buy into. The invented premise is that all of these games were created by a cult classic studio named UFO Soft in the 1980s. It’s a fictional company with very real roots in pioneers like Jeff Minter’s Llamasoft.

To properly communicate how well UFO 50 builds that fiction, we decided to take a structural swing of our own crafted from the same historical roots. The below review imagines a fictional Digital Trends Magazine, modeled after historic gaming publications like Zzap!64. It is both a review of all 50 games in the collection, as well as a fictional play about three critics that unfolds through their writing over an eight-year span. If you’re just here for a straight recommendation, UFO 50 will give you more value for your buck than any game released in 2024. But if you’re willing to get a little experimental with us, read on.]

Happy New Year, Trendsetters! We have a good feeling that 1992 is going to be a great year for video games, especially with the continued rise of the Super Nintendo. We’ll have plenty of great games to review this year, but before barreling forward, we wanted to take a moment to reflect. Sometimes we’re so focused on the future of tech here at Digital Trends Magazine that we lose sight of the games, developers, and lost eras that brought us so much joy. It’s with that thought that we present a very