UFO 50 review – a galaxy of 80s games brought brilliantly back to the future

When he was a schoolboy, Derek Yu, one of the first indie game superstars of the 2000s, designed games on graph paper with his friend Jon Perry. After Yu's first major game, Spelunky, became a hit, he and Perry agreed to collaborate again, no longer as classmates but as men in their 40s. This sweet backstory infuses UFO 50, a dizzyingly ambitious collection of 50 games that, so the narrative framing goes, were created by a fictional games company during the eight-year period from 1982 to 1989. Each game has the aesthetic of an Atari 2600 or NES classic – chunky sprites, a warbling chiptune soundtrack – but uses current design trends and understanding to inject old-looking games with modern freshness. But it's a sufficiently high number that Yu and Perry (and some supportive developer friends) have been able to flex their design talent across an electrifying range of genres, some of which are familiar, others of which are entirely new.