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It might seem odd to suggest that a game filled to the brim with tough-as-nails twitch action games, thinky arcade puzzlers, and even a full-blown narrative RPG is not nostalgic, but UFO 50, a compilation of 50 retro-inspired games of varying sizes, is full of surprises. It has its influences, of course. Magical Garden pulls on Snake. Valtress is something of a cross between Kid Icarus and Downwell. It has a steady dedication to looking and sounding like games of the past. However, UFO 50 draws as much on 2000s era game jam culture as the NES itself. Rather than a mere evocation of retro titles, UFO 50 has a longing for creative constriction. Each individual game’s simplicity serves a widening and deepening, a desire to pull as much as possible out of every pixel. UFO 50 creates the feeling of wide-openness, that video games can be anything. This is a feeling that has only thrived on the margins in video games and thus un-markable as a generalized nostalgia. When big business wants you to believe the new hotness represents all that video games can be, it is refreshing to look backward and forward at once.
To my mind, UFO 50’s
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