6 Games To Squeeze In Before October

Play it on: PC
Current goal: Get more stuff for the garden

I have copies of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and Astro Bot sitting here, just waiting to be played. Black Myth: Wukong, meanwhile, is freshly installed on my PC’s hard drive, still waiting for me to give it the attention it deserves. But this weekend, I fear those three games will get scant little attention from me, as I continue sinking most of my gaming time into the extraordinary UFO 50.

What keeps me coming back to UFO 50 isn’t just the games themselves, though obviously that’s the main thing, the thing without which nothing else would matter. It’s the way that, for each of its 50 games, there are three different goals to strive for. The easiest is usually earning a game’s “garden” item, an object that then goes into a garden where a little mascot character lives, puttering around in their house and yard and interacting with all the different items you’ve earned for them so far. Then comes earning a “gold” cart for the game, which typically happens when you beat it, and then there’s the highest achievement, earning the “cherry” cart, which usually demands you not only beat a game but do so with particular mastery or aplomb. For an arcade-style game, it might mean earning a certain number of points on your way to its conclusion, for instance, while in an adventure game, it may require snagging a particular item en route to victory. With so many games to swap between and so many goals to strive for, I always feel like I’m making progress toward something, even if some challenges still elude me.

In particular, this weekend I hope to make more progress in the dungeon-crawler Valbrace (I’m currently on floor 4), complete some more stages in the innovative sacrificial platformer Mortol, snag the cherry cart for the wonderfully summery arcade shooter Seaside Drive, and maybe complete my second escape from the planet in the resource-harvesting Zelda-like game Pilot Quest.  An opening screen in UFO 50 shows the old machine for which these games were ostensibly released, captioned with the text, “PLAY FOREVER.” In the case of UFO 50, I think I just might.—Carolyn Petit