The Best Game of 2024 Is Now on the Switch

If you somehow missed all the breathless praise for UFO 50—both from us at our old site Paste and from pretty much the entire rest of the video game world—here’s what you need to know. It’s a compilation of games made by the studio UFO Soft between 1982 and 1989—except UFO Soft never existed and all of these games were developed since 2016 by an all-star group of modern designers, including Spelunky creator Derek Yu and Downwell designer Ojiro Fumoto. So it’s a brand new retro compilation about a fictional company, featuring over four dozen of its games, which are all made to feel like they really could’ve existed in the 1980s. Those games touch on all kinds of game genres, and reflect the technical limitations of the years in which they were supposedly made, while often featuring elements or minor twists that would have been quietly revolutionary at the time. Together they create a deep, layered, nuanced look at how games were made and played in the 1980s, with various narrative and design threads subtly telling the story of the fictional UFO Soft and its employees.

The upside to a collection of 50 games is that you’re bound to like at least a few of them. UFO 50 has an unusually high hit rate, though; I would say that at least 30 of the games are legitimately good, with a couple dozen trending into “great” territory. Our list of UFO 50’s 10 best games includes several that would be near the very top of any year-end list I’ve ever made for Paste or Endless Mode. Grimstone, for instance, is a tremendous RPG in the style of classic Final Fantasy, Overbold recreates the arena shooter for the 8-bit era, and the absolutely brilliant Party House is equal parts strategy and luck and a game I could probably play for the rest of my life.

It’s been almost a year since UFO 50 originally came out for PC, and until now that’s been the only way to play it. So if you’re one of the many out there who believe that computers are for work and not play you’ve been out of luck. Fortunately anybody with a Switch can now dive into UFO Soft’s bountiful world, for the price of $24.99—or just under 50 cents per game.