As someone who cherishes the variety of good game design, UFO 50 has left a giant meteorite crater in my waking hours. Weekend plans mysteriously vanish from my calendar. Dishes pile up. It’s seamlessly clicked into an empty space in my brain like few others have.
Each of the 50 (50!) quasi-retro games in the pack revolves around inventive mechanics that take some experimentation to figure out, creating an incredibly cerebral experience overall. In fact, the game’s sorting function even has a category for “thinky play.” How convenient! Of the 22 puzzle, tactics, strategy and exploration games on offer in UFO 50, these have been my favorites so far.
Honorable mentions
Block Koala is UFO 50’s sokoban. If you like pushing blocks around, then oh boy this is definitely a game in which you do that. I didn’t find it quite inventive enough to hold my interest, but with 50 levels to pick through, it’s far and away the most robust pure puzzler in the pack.
Mini & Max isn’t technically in the “thinky play” category. It’s a traditional platformer with an emphasis on exploration. But the way it uses its core mechanic of growing and shrinking regularly had my head flying from my shoulders in surprise, and for that alone, it deserves a place on any thinky player’s list.
Night Manor
UFO 50 contains a full JRPG, a grand strategy game, several metroidvanias, and a dungeon crawler the in-game clock tells me I’ve spent 15 hours on all by itself.
Night Manor remains its most impressive achievement. It’s not just a horror game, but a good one. Every element—the infested visual design, the eerie music, mechanical flourishes like the use of a shaking cursor to indicate panic—works together to create an atmosphere of unease that transcends its faux-’80s tech.
Underneath is a rock solid foundation of puzzle design. Sharp, thorough writing lets Night Manor avoid typical point-and-click pitfalls by clearly describing objects in the environment and rewarding “close enough” answers. Not every obstacle feels life-or-death threatening, especially near the end. But in true slasher movie fashion, Night Manor accelerates to a swift and bloody finish before it can overstay its welcome.
Camouflage
You’d be hard-pressed to find a modern stealth game that doesn’t borrow from shooters in some way. But when you strip the genre back to its bare bones, observing enemy routes and plotting a course around them, stealth games end up looking a whole lot like puzzle games.
Camouflage’s light (yet surprisingly resonant) narrative throws me into a dangerous world as a little lizard whose only tool for survival is the ability to blend in with my surroundings. Like all of the best puzzle games, Camouflage commits to this theme and teaches the player a new way of seeing its world. I learn to parse each level in swathes of color and gaps in enemy vision cones. When everything clicks, I feel like I’m eking my survival out from under the noses of predators.
Later levels introduce mechanics that require dexterity rather than pure brain power, which sucks some of the fun out of route planning. I was much more engaged by the optional difficulty of hunting collectibles Incidentally, that made Camouflage my first cherry cart.
Devilition
Devilition feels like UFO 50’s shot at block-clearing games like Tetris, only instead of wrangling blocks, you wrangle weird little guys to clear out waves of weird little guys. (Dr. Mario may be a closer comparison.)
The goal is to save townsfolk by blasting demons off of a grid, and your primary means of doing this is setting off explosive chains of aforementioned weird little guys. A scarecrow attacks a cannon that fires into a snake that attacks golems on either side of itself, and so on and so on.
Devilition trades the sheer efficiency of falling block puzzlers for a variety of mechanics to explore, and keeps a healthy amount of depth in the process. Like—and don’t ask me how I learned this—you win a wave as long as there are more townsfolk than demons. But if one or two villagers get caught up in your blast radius… Well, you are a mad alchemist, after all. Devilition is full of maniacal little discoveries like these.
I didn’t rush to return to Devilition once I’d beaten it, but the couple of hours I did spend totally absorbed my concentration.
Mortol
Mortal’s core mechanic of sacrificing lives to clear paths and create platforms is pretty brilliant on the face of it. But that brilliance would have been wasted without some of the sharpest level design this side of Shovel Knight. Just about every screen has three layers: the “oh, I bet I can make it through this” layer, the “oh that’s how they want me to do it” layer, and the “I am the smartest person alive” layer.
I, unfortunately, am far from the smartest person alive, so Mortol mostly knocked me senseless until I managed to sneak in a lucky hit. Failing to sightread a screen—or seeing a solution but failing to execute the proper platforming mechanics—made wasting lives an inevitability. The minmaxer in me constantly struggled to cut my losses, opting instead for the cumbersome process of resetting the whole level to try again.
Despite my frustrations, I came back to dash myself against Mortol again and again. Maybe I was the real sacrifice all along.
Lords of Diskonia
Lords of Diskonia, aka Fire Emblem shuffleboard, plays way smoother than its gleefully slapdash premise might imply. It trades the percent-to-hit system of conventional turn-based tactics games for skillshots, asking you to send units careening into hazardous terrain, strategic resources and, of course, enemy units.
After ramping up to its full complexity, Lords of Diskonia’s armies consist of dragons, vampires, war spiders, and other fantasy critters, each with their own unique mechanics. The strategy layer, too, starts restrained before blooming into a satisfying cat-and-mouse game.
The race to draft a capable army before my opponent prevented me from locking in on a preferred playstyle. Sometimes I had access to my favorite units, but other times I was cornered with just a few simple soldiers and had to rely on positioning and perfect lineups.
I didn’t always succeed—partly due to the enemy AI, which flips from inept to virtuoso seemingly at random—but in Lords of Diskonia, losing a battle isn’t the end. Play smart, and you can still win the war.
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